Halo: Venator
by Qur'a 'Morhek
Summary: There are some secrets that should never be discovered; some shadows that the light should never touch; monsters dwell in the dark spaces, like the bogeymen of childhood, and not all of them are so easily dispelled...
1. Oncoming Storms

_Halo is a copyrighted franchise of Microsoft Corporation and 343 Industries and "Alien" is a copyrighted franchise of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. No claim of ownership over any characters, places, events or items that are not original is asserted. Many thanks to my fellow members of Halo Fanon for being just generally awesome, especially Matt-256 for lending me the character of Helen Calypso. And, as they say, read and review!_

**1312 HOURS, 27TH FEBRUARY, 2557 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / "RAPTORS NEST" SITE, UNSC PROWLER **_**HUNTERS ARROW**_

"Final launch phase initiated. Last call for the bathroom!"

There were a few laughs on the COM. It wasn't very funny, but in this line of work you needed all the humour you could muster.

ODST's used Single-Occupant Exo-atmospheric Insertion Pods (SOEIV's) to carry them from an orbiting ship to the ground. They were fast, small, and agile – the chances of a platoon of Helljumpers surviving whatever anti-air defences the ground station had were better than if the whole unit went in on a single dropship – fewer fatalities, smaller chance of impact, and so on. But they had still been nicknamed by all branches "flying coffins" – cocoons of titanium and vanadium sheathed in lead and ablative armour for re-entry.

It didn't help that you went in virtually standing – Wallace couldn't shake the feeling that he was falling. He didn't fear heights – he feared losing control. Each pod had controls to guide thrust and guidance, but they were virtually redundant – their drops were controlled remotely, either by controllers on the ship or by an AI.

The pod jerked suddenly as the final readiness check was completed, swinging out away from the entry bay along the tracks on the ventral hull. If he'd had a window, he would have seen forty identical grey lead capsules, all attached to the black hull like ticks on a sheep – he could see them in his mind's eye. He could see the flare of thrusters as they launched, the sight of dozens of SOEIV's _falling_ away, each one carrying one of his men and women.

He'd been through just over a dozen drops now, and he hated every one of them.

"Okay boys and girls, tuck your magazines away and pull your skivvies up. We're dropping hard and fast – once we hit, we're in the dark. No contact with the Hunters Arrow, total radio silence. We take the facility, then the Spartans come down with shining armour and ONI gear. Until then, it's just us."

""_Just" us? The bastards won't know what hit 'em!"_

Wallace grinned to himself, even as he barked out, "Stop clogging the COM Jackson. We drop in five minutes – if you still need to go, you'll just have to wait."

More laughs on the COM. Public humiliation always earned a laugh, and Jackson was a favourite target of Wallace's. He could take it – that was a valuable trait in a Helljumper.

He ran through another last-minute check of his pod. The Navy technicians had done one when they loaded it, and he'd gone over it with a fine-tooth comb before launch – but it never hurt to make sure. Weapons? His silenced caseless submachine gun was clipped to the side of the pod, right next to the silenced M6C and extra pouched of ammunition. Supplies? A pack full of MRE's, water, some maintenance tools and electronic gear they might need in the field, and if they failed there were a few dedicated supply pods launching too – as well as the _special_ pods carrying four M12 Warthog light reconnaissance vehicles, if they were needed.

What he _really_ needed to check was the pod's computer systems. A last-minute crack in the processing chip could send him into a tumble that he'd never make it out of, not without some divinely inspired luck. He wished he could check the thrusters again, make sure the launch would be smooth, but for that he'd need two hours and a vacuum-resistant suit. He'd have to trust the maintenance crew.

"The launch countdown appeared on his helmet's display – five, four three…two…one.

The pod jolted, rockets roared above Wallace's head. His stomach dropped as the pod fell.

The ODST motto was "feet first into hell." Their job was to make sure it was full when they got there.

He gripped the padded titanium bars that wrapped around him, supporting and confining him, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Calypso watched from a view screen as rocket flares lit the night, flickering against the ventral hull, and the pods dropped away from the ship like stones falling through water.

"You wish you were with them?"

She turned, trying not to show his impatience. "I'm a TROJAN-grade operative, sir. I should be in the first wave."

The smiled sympathetically, his moustache curling at the corners of his mouth. "Don't worry, ma'am. If everything goes according to plan, you'll get your action. You're going down on the first bird."

"And if it doesn't go according to plan?" she asked.

"Then we'll toss you out an airlock and you can drop in on the boys on the ground," the man said, grinning.

She turned away from him. The ship's captain was a pleasant sort of man – amiable, easy to work with, and intelligent. Not the sort of man ONI usually trusted their prized stealth ships with, but he worked his Prowler with typical Navy efficiency. She understood that the crew looked up to the Captain as the isolated father figure, while the executive officer carried out his orders – she wasn't used to the idea of being in a military chain of command though.

She didn't trust him, or everyone else on this ship. Well, almost everyone.

The bridge door hissed open, and a massive figure clad in green armour stepped through. An arm snapped up in a salute, exaggeratedly slow for the benefit of the un-augmented crew and the captain.

"Sir, dropships Tango One-Four-Niner and Sierra Three-Three-Eight are nearly prepped and ready for launch. Are the ODST's away?"

The captain nodded to the view screen in front of Calypso. "They just left, Chief. ETA is twenty minutes, and then another one hour to storm the facility and disable the AA guns. We'll get you down in time for the mopping up, don't worry."

"Yes sir. Permission to return to the hangar?"

"Granted."

The Spartan, more than two and a half meters tall and clad in state-of-the-art MJOLNIR armour, gave another salute and turned to leave, giving a subtle nod to Calypso as he did. The doors hissed shut again.

The rest of the bridge crew had fallen silent, stunned. They returned to their bustling hive of activity almost eagerly.

Calypso grinned. She had been serving around Spartans for years – as a TROJAN operative, even she had to admit that a Spartan supersoldier in full gear was an impressive sight. She knew there were another two in the hangar below, still getting ready for deployment – she could only imagine the looks they were getting from the loaders and maintenance crew.

The captain raised his eyebrows questioningly. "I thought you'd be down there with them, Miss Calypso."

"The only thing I need to bring with me is my sniper rifle and enough rounds to give whatever I find out there on a one-way ticket to hell."

She brusquely shrugged off his other questions by leaving the bridge. The man was curious – too curious. Not about her, though he certainly tried to come off as friendly and perhaps a little too flirtatious than was proper for a man of his age. He was curious about the operation they were on, and was trying to fish for answers – and she couldn't give him any.

The planetoid below them was barely inhabitable by human standards, a dead lump of rock and the occasional lava flow orbiting a gas giant. The atmosphere was breathable, but only barely, and the ODST's would be using their own oxygen supply in any case until they secured the facility on the surface. It was hard to believe there was anything down there of interest to the UNSC, or to anyone else for that matter.

The small and innocuous sensor satellites in orbit, the trio of corvette-class human warships patrolling near the moon, and the heat blooms on the infrared imagers that represented automated thermal vents from fusion reactors begged to differ, however.

He caught the ship's elevator "down" to the hangar. The Prowler's decks were tilted on a 90 degree angle, so that they could use the ships momentum in lieu of artificial gravity, with only minor corrections to account for acceleration, deceleration and manoeuvring. The elevator that ran "down" the ship stretched along its horizontal axis, all the way to the rear and the engine room. She stepped off on the hangar deck. Prowlers were only large enough for one hangar, but it was still cavernous, and filled by two D77 Pelican dropships with people crawling all over them.

This was a rush job by ONI – fitting dropships with stealth features was like coating a rock dropping into lave with water, since mostly it just peeled off during re-entry. She hoped it would be worth it.

One of the Spartans was sitting on the ramp, fitting a Stanchion gauss rifle with a digital scope. Calypso smiled.

"Nice to see you again Laura! Are they finished yet?"

The Spartan shrugged, but Calypso kept her eyes focussed on her hands.

_They're taking their sweet time as usual. Going over it again and again._

"Practice makes perfect, they say."

_So they say._

She grinned, and nodded to the Stanchion. "A bit much, don't you think? We'll be firing tight corridors – a gauss rifle isn't exactly a close quarter's weapon."

_Don't tell me how to do my job._

She shrugged, and turned back away from her. The Spartan hadn't said a word.

Petty Officer Laura-125, Indigo Three, was mute. Complications during the augmentation process had almost killed her, her own muscled crushing her vocal chords. The doctors had saved her life, but not her voice. Doctor Halsey, head of the SPARTAN-II Program, had decided she didn't want to risk having a mute among her precious supersoldiers, and had assigned her to training duties.

Somebody _else_ had decided they _could_ risk it, and had recruited her for another group – Indigo Team.

The rest of the team was made up of Chief Petty Officer Andrew-306 and Petty Officer Jeremy-068, both also recruited covertly – as far as Calypso knew, Jeremy's heart had stopped on the operating table and he'd been declared legally dead. It had come as a pleasant surprise for Indigo's recruiters when he'd gasped back to life an hour later, apparent none the worse for his near-death experience. Andrew had been more problematic, but he'd eventually agreed to join up – and after that, ONI had its own Spartans ready for deployment, outside of Halsey's chain of command.

Indigo Team weren't the only ones, but they were among the best and most experienced. Slightly over thirty years of combat against human rebels and Covenant invaders had produced soldiers who were tough, experienced, and capable of dealing with anything that was thrown at them. Calypso sometimes doubted they really needed the MJOLNIR armour they wore that enhanced their speed, strength and reflexes, and gave them a protective shield.

Right now, Andrew and Jeremy were leaning over a holographic studying the terrain, their helmets set upon it.

"Assault Force Alpha attacks Facility One," Andrew said, pointing at a point on the map, "knocking out their sensors and communications, while Assault Group Beta detonates the airfield. Assault Group Gamma proceeds to Facility Two," pointing to another part of the map, "clearing it of hostiles enough for the dropship to land. If they need it, we'll provide gunship support – if not, we just disembark and join the assault. Assault groups one and two converge on the objective, and we all link up here," he said, pointing at a third part, "to contact the Hunters Arrow."

Jeremy, taller and bulkier than Andrew even in the MJOLNIR, scratched his chin worried. "I still worry about the corvettes," he said in an accept that Calypso would have placed as Russian or another Eastern European country on Earth. "One Mac round from them will not just wipe out the objective, but it'll wipe us out too."

"Leave that to the Navy," Andrew said. "Our focus is the ground – they wouldn't send us if they thought the enemy would fire upon their own facility."

"Don't underestimate them," said Calypso as she drew near. "Rebels aren't exactly known for their code of honour."

Andrew was handsome in a rugged kind of way. He was clean shaved, hair cropped close, but still emanated a rugged feel, enhanced by the mottled scar that traced a line across his left eye. Jeremy was unshaven, sporting a small beard and moustache that was decidedly non-regulation, but otherwise bald. They both turned to look at her as she approached them.

Andrew nodded respectfully. "VECTOR. Good to see you."

Calypso smiled. "And you, Andy."

He frowned. "If we're keeping it casual, then I prefer "Andrew"."

"And I'd prefer "Helen", if you don't mind," she retorted, seeing Jeremy smirking to himself. She rounded on him. "What's so funny?"

His facial hair parted as he grinned. "You two bicker like a married couple every time you meet. It's sweet."

Andrew glared at the two of them, then grabbed his helmet, almost slamming into place over his head. "Gear up. The Helljumpers should be halfway there by now, in range of enemy anti-air guns."

Jeremy placed his own helmet on his head, shrugging in amusement. "Not the most subtle way to change the subject, is it?"

"Oh shut up," she snapped.

The outside of the Pelican wasn't the only thing ONI had upgraded. Inside, the troop bay was filled by monitors and readouts, failsafe controls, and additional racks for ammunition and weapons. The only passengers they would be taking were the three Spartans and Helen Calypso, so creature comforts weren't exactly a priority – most of the seats had been ripped away so that the technical team could fit water tanks to store additional heat so that the stealth measures would last longer.

"They're going to a lot of trouble to make sure we reach that facility," she commented. "A prowler? Stealth gunships? Not to mention the fact that they're sending us in the first place."

Jeremy made a noncommittal gesture with his head, not quite a shrug but close. "They must want it pretty badly."

"Have you been briefed on what to expect?" She asked Andrew.

"ONI is flying blind on this," he said, glad of the change of subject. "No topography, no force deployments, nothing – just what the Hunters Arrow scanned while you were still in cryo storage, and that's still not much."

"Great," she said sarcastically. "So we're going in blind, without backup or intel, and without even knowing how many of the enemy is in there? Military intelligence – now _there's_ a contradiction of terms."

Andrew sat at one of the computer terminals and began to type as a woman in a wheelchair rolled out of the elevator, making her way up the ramp. "Not quite without intel."

The woman was young, and would have been pretty if not for her legs, which looked as though they'd been snapped in several places and healed slightly askew. UNSC medical technology could knit broken bone within minutes these days – something serious must have happened to her for it to be so hard to treat.

Calypso looked around at Andrew, Jeremy and Laura bemused. "They're sending us a _cripple?_"

"I prefer the term "differently able"," she said coldly, holding Calypso in a glare. "Commander Rachel Fenworth. Codename ORACLE."

Jeremy offered a hand, at which the commander was surprised but took as he gently shook her hand. "Indigo Two, Jeremy. Welcome aboard the love boat."

She smiled, and Calypso and Andrew shared a glance of exasperation as they saw that the joke had already spread.

"Yeah, I've heard about you two," the Fenworth said wryly. "I hope there won't be any problems?"

Calypso shrugged. "As long as he keeps his hands to himself, we should be fine."

Andrew stood up so quickly he sent the chair sprawling behind him "Now look here-"

"_This is the captain. All hands to combat alert bravo. Indigo team and agents VECTOR and ORACLE, report to the bridge immediately."_

Fenworth frowned, and so did Calypso. If their faceplates had been transparent, Calypso was sure Indigo would be frowning as well. This wasn't part of the plan, as hastily cobbled-together as it was. And if it wasn't part of the plan, it was a distraction – maybe a necessary one, but distractions got soldiers and Marines killed.

Fenworth held a hand to her earpiece. "Affirmative. En route sir."

The group disembarked from the Pelican, a group of technicians hastily filling the now-empty space to continue work on the heat sinks and install more communications gear in the already tiny space. Laura gave the Commander a nod as she passed, returned with a slightly surprised look. Calypso checked her holster, feeling the comforting weight of her customised pistol there – any unknown factors would find her a formidable force, even without powered armour.

* * *

Wallace woke with a start as the pod hit the ground, he must have passed out – that hadn't happened before, but it didn't surprise him. A lot of troopers went to sleep during drops, even the veterans – it was a way of coping with the stress when it became too much.

He knew a few relished it, though. More than a few, in fact – those who got accepted into the ODST Divisions were already one screw short of a toolbox, and to some of them their drops represented a quite literal drop into hell. Wallace had read Dante's Inferno when he'd been a university student, back on Mars – Dante and his guide, Virgil, made their way through the descending circles of hell on their way up to the rising circles of purgatory, then through that to the spheres of heaven. To get to heaven, you had to start at hell – and in their line of work, there were _plenty_ of demons to mow their way through on the way, human and alien.

The pod rocked a little, and for a moment he worried it would tip, but in the third rock it settled mostly vertically as he sighed in relief. The hatch of the pod burst off as explosive charges blew it off its hinges, and the clamps around Wallace meant to stop him rattling inside the pod retracted, allowing him to unclip himself and drop out of the pod.

He pulled his M6, sweeping the immediate area for hostiles. When he was satisfied that the haunting and lonely landscape was inhabited only by him, he turned back to the pod and retrieved his gear – the MRE's, the M7 caseless submachine gun, and the ammunition. Then he opened his display's tactical map.

Up above them, the Prowler would still have its stealth systems engaged. Instead, a small satellite had been released a few hours prior to coordinate the ground forces – a Stealth Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Satellite, or STARS, coordinated the management of more than forty ODST's all using their helmet's integrated digital information management systems – tactical maps, team bio sign displays, and encryption of inter-unit communications. He waited patiently as his suit linked up to the orbiting satellite, establishing a connection, and reviewed what he knew about the mission as he did so.

The ODST forces were split up into three forces – the pods of Assault Group Alpha were programmed to land near the moon's communications relay station. They would need to knock that out first before they could do anything – any counter-response would need coordination, and without COM access they'd be restricted to local radios and verbal communications. The relay was also a sensor outpost, with a radar station that could prove tricky if the enemy wanted to pinpoint either the _Hunters Arrow_ or the STARS in orbit, if the three corvettes up there didn't do it first.

Even so, a counter-assault would be next to impossible for them to fend off, because there was an airfield not too far from the relay station – the satellite had showed a handful of dropships, and four of the older SkyHawk jump-jet fighters. Those fighters would be a problem, even if they had brought anti-air weapons – so that was why Assault Group Beta's job was to destroy the airfield. They would paint the target with a laser target painter, and the Hunters Arrow above would launch an Archer missile – destroy the enemy's entire air complement in one shot. If the enemy corvettes weren't already on the Prowler's tail, they would be after that – hence the loss of contact.

Wallace preferred to think of it as independence. Running ground operations from orbit was risky, because naval staff didn't always have the full picture. It was better in his opinion for ground commanders to be given more leeway, allow them to use the facts at their disposal for their judgement. It also removed the bureaucracy that the Unified Earth Government always kept trying to foist on the military, for "safety" reasons.

He just wished it was up to someone else.

He was commander of Assault Group Gamma, a full two squads including his own. He was barely a Staff Sergeant, and the Colonel had still designated him as Charlie Platoon's commanding officer for this mission. Usually it would be a Lieutenant or a Captain, but their previous commander had been killed a while back, on Unmoving Virtue against Brute forces. They hadn't been able to replace him, and so Sergeant Grant Wallace had been promoted to Staff Sergeant and given command.

Their job was much harder than Alpha or Gamma – they were the group that got to attack the main objective itself. Hence the larger size, and the four Warthogs. He'd _meant_ to land further to the north-west, closer to the objective. His pod must have drifted off course – that happened sometimes, even with STARS guiding it in. He sighed, heaved his gear onto his back, and grabbed his SMG.

"You lost, stranger?"

Wallace jumped, brought his weapon up as he turned – and then lowered it as he saw a familiar face.

"Jeez, Vasquez, didn't your parents teach you not sneak up on people!"

The other ODST grinned underneath her transparent faceplate. "Guess they skipped that lesson."

Vasquez was his second in command – still a corporal, but with more field experience than the rest of the unit combined. She'd been a late transfer from the Marine Corps – they both had. They'd already fought the Covenant on seven worlds before they'd been approved for the Helljumpers – and even then, only barely.

She hopped briskly down from the boulder she was standing on, battle rifle held loosely at her side. She was a little short for a Helljumper, but more than made up for it by being a mean bitch in a fight, able to make a man in half with her pinkie. He'd seen her in a bar fight once – the look of glee as she took on four big, hulking soldier's who'd insulted her had frightened him. But there was nobody else he'd rather have fighting next to him.

"Did you see the fireworks they sent up?" she asked, polarising the faceplate again.

"No. I decided to take a nap instead."

"That's probably a good thing, because there weren't any. The big guns were quiet the whole trip."

Wallace frowned. "Really? They didn't pick us up?"

"Yeah," she said, shrugging. "I thought maybe Alpha had hit the ground early, knocked them out before the rest of us landed, but they were still up there with us. I checked."

Wallace looked around them at the bleak landscape again. "They're beginning the mission?"

"I don't know. The STARS cut them off at that point, and I had bigger things to worry about, like getting my ass safely on the ground."

Wallace grinned. "Well, I'm sure the battalion will thank you for that. It's our biggest asset!"

She made a very un-ladylike gesture with her hand.

He opened the TACMAP, zooming out as far as it would let him, the maximum scope just barely accommodating all three targets – Alpha were definitely on the move, and fast too. It didn't look they were under fire at all – no hostile signatures registered. Beta were moving as well, and seemed to be having just as easy a time of it as Alpha. Gamma, on the other hand, seemed to have gotten scattered across a plateau – still close to the facility, but now they'd have to waste valuable time linking up and humping it the extra distance.

"At least tell me the 'hogs made it," he said.

"All four in one piece, two troop transports, a Gauss 'hog and a LAAG 'hog."

He sighed in relief. That would make things easier by far – not just for the firepower, but with the mobility. They might have to make several trips, but they'd still be able to bring Alpha and Beta in once they'd secured the facility. _If_ they secured the facility.

"Well, I guess we'd better get this show on the road", he said, adjusting the strap of his backpack, feeling the shift of the weight to make sure nothing jostled. "Let's move out, Corporal!"

"Copy that, Sarge!"

* * *

"What do you mean "dead"?"

Fenworth hadn't meant it to be quite as loud as that, but it echoed around the bridge. A few junior officers made the mistake of looking around to see what the problem was, and quickly turned to their work to avoid her glare.

The captain sighed. "I mean drifting, Commander. At first, we thought they were on patrol – they were heading in a straight line towards the SSEP One of the system, even if it was a little slow. No main or RCS thrusters, but that's not unusual in low-density areas. But they haven't made a course correction in hours, and two minutes ago this happened."

The holographic screen activated, showing the flight path of the corvettes…and a massive chunk of asteroid.

"Standard practice on any ship, UNSC or rebel, is to avoid any threat as soon as it appears. They should either have altered their course or, if it was that important, destroyed the incoming object. So far, they have done neither. In approximately three hours, the asteroid will collide with the lead ship – the debris cloud will hit the other two, crippling the both of them, sending them tumbling through space."

She frowned. "You're sure they're dead? They're not just staying silent?"

It was a stupid suggestion, and she felt stupid as the captain raised his eyebrows condescendingly. "They're right there, Commander. No stealth measures, even if their thrusters aren't operating. If they're running dark, then they must think we're totally blind."

She shrugged helplessly. "Then what? They abandoned ship?"

"No. We risked an active sensor sweep – their lifepods are still docket. All of them."

"So there's nobody left to abandon ship," said Calypso darkly.

The five of them were all arrayed around the display table in the ships CIC – the Spartans, Fenworth, and Calypso. To be honest, Fenworth would rather Calypso stay the hell away from her – the woman may be ex-ORION, but she was also ex-rebel too, a former assassin of the people they were tracking down. She'd turned on her employers, but only after wiping out an entire platoon of Marines. Her skills, however, made her too valuable to turn down, or to incarcerate, even if the UNSC was brave enough to try.

She trusted the opinions of the Spartans, on the other hand. They weren't like the other operatives their section had available – HIGH DRAGON, or ORPHEUS. They weren't arrogant, they weren't overconfident, and they didn't come with much baggage. They seemed genuine, and Fenworth appreciated that.

The captain, though, she was less sure of, for better or worse – he was curious, but didn't pry too deeply. She could feel his disdain for her rolling off him in waves – not the fact that she was in a wheelchair, but just the fact that she was an ONI spook.

The Office of Naval Intelligence controlled every Prowler. The captain was ONI too, and even he hated "spooks". It made her job harder, but it was something in his favour at least.

"What about a boarding action?" asked Andrew. "Do we have time before the Marines complete their mission?"

Fenworth shook her head. "Negative, Chief. We need your boots on the ground as soon as they're finished down there."

"What about me?"

Five sets of eyes turned to Calypso. She shrugged.

"I'm not exactly a Spartan, but if you give me a Vac suit I can go over, check them out, and report back."

Fenworth frowned. "Do we need to? If they're drifting, then they're not a threat. If they're not a threat, we don't need to worry about it, so we?"

"If something took out three corvettes and left them intact," said Andrew, "then shouldn't we be prepared? It might still be in the system, and if it is then that puts the _Hunters Arrow_ at risk."

"And moving us anywhere near that threat puts us at even greater risk," interjected the captain. "My vote is we let them drift on their own, hit the asteroid; that, or we hit them with an archer missile each to the engines, make sure they're completely destroyed."

Fenworth sat in silence for a moment, contemplating her options. Eventually she turned to Calypso, and sighed.

"Suit up, VECTOR. But _just_ to investigate. If you run into anything, any resistance or any threats, I'm pulling you out of there."

"Yes ma'am!" she barked, snapping off a mocking salute and leaving the bridge.

"And us?" asked Jeremy.

"You head on down to the moon and help the Helljumpers mop up the enemy defences."

"So far they haven't run into any," said the captain, raising an eye quizzically. "Dead ships, dead moon – do you think there's anything down there worth sending in Spartans?"

Fenworth backed away from the table. "To be honest, Captain, if it was up to me we'd scrub this entire operation – blow everything from orbit, and let it all drift. But I have my orders, and so do you. Indigo, head down to the hangar bay and be ready for deployment. We'll make a low-orbit pass and launch you as we make the burn, then dock with one of the corvettes and send VECTOR in. Having two teams in the field isn't what I'd planned, but my prerogative here is flexible enough for it."

Indigo team snapped off salutes of their own, crisp and clean and barren of the derision that had dripped from Codename VECTOR's, and headed out of the bridge the way they had came.

The captain and Fenworth watched them go, and then he leaned forward across the table, close to her. "Commander, you may have operational authority here, but you do anything to endanger my ship or my crew, then so help me-"

Fenworth waved a dismissive hand. "Don't worry, Captain. I have no intention of doing anything of the sort."

* * *

"Eyes-on the objective. Two guards posted on the sentry towers, and it looks like a dog patrol in the inner fence. The other sites may have been abandoned but this place is as lively as we expected – bastards look jumpy, too."

Great. Wallace shook his head in disbelief. Out of all the teams, his was going to be the only one to face any opposition. Alpha and Beta had both been no-shows, completing their mission objectives without encountering any resistance. They were on their way to Facility Two now, way ahead of schedule. He'd considered sending out the Warthogs to bring them in quicker, but he decided against it – he didn't want to let them wait, and they'd need the firepower to bust through the fence.

He held up a digital scope of his own, scouting out the enemy positions. There was a main road leading from the air field, forty kilometres to the south west, with a road block running through three perimeter fences. There was no barbed wire at the top, so he suspected they were electrified – perhaps explaining why the guards kept their distance from the fences. A sentry tower stood next to the road block, and it looked like the two occupants were snipers or sharpshooters – he zoomed in closer – definitely snipers. Damn.

They'd have to go in fast, and take down the snipers first. Then punch through the fence, take down the dog patrol, and then assault the main building itself. That was a lot of noise, and if they were unlucky the rebels might set the facility into lockdown before they could get in. If they did, the gunships would punch a big enough hole, but he didn't want it to come to that.

He looked at Corporal Nelson, the other scout. "What's the ETA on the dropships?"

The man checked his chronometer, attached to the wrist of his suit. "Forty minutes. The AA guns are silent, and air support has been taken out, but they still need time for transit. They still insist on coming in low, under the radar – just in case."

In case of what, Wallace wondered. This world was almost dead – the ground around them was black rock, eerily rolling and curving across the landscape. It looked almost skeletal, and was depressing in a way he couldn't quite define. Almost as though some giant god had ripped out the bones of the moon from the inside.

Later, that thought would return to him.

The both slid down from the rocks they had used for cover, down the smooth rock, and hit the ground rolling to their feet. The two dozen ODST's waiting for them turned in a sea of silver faceplates and black helmets.

"Alright, we'll kick this thing off in thirty minutes. I want our snipers to pick off theirs – to men to one target, I want them dead by the time the Warthogs roll out. Once the snipers are down, the rest of the assault force moves up, using the rocks for cover – Warthogs barrel through the fences, and engage the patrols. Once the perimeter guard is down, we take the building, entering through the front and rear entrances – if we had dropships, I'd order a rooftop insertion as well, but we don't so oh well. MG warthog keeps up suppressing fire until the rest of the assault group catches up, while the Gauss 'hog punches holes in the front."

It was ballsy, he admitted to himself. The enemy obviously didn't expect an armoured assault, even though the light reconnaissance vehicles were quite capable of managing the difficult terrain, but they would still be leaving their biggest assets open to destruction in the opening minutes. They'd still have the troop transports currently ferrying one of the other assault groups, but they'd only be good as rams to bring down the fences. And they'd still have the snipers to deal with. But it could work.

Someone raised a hand. He nodded. "Yes, Lance Corporal?"

The junior NCO nodded his head over to where the squad, black building sat, and said "Do we even know what's in there? What's worth an operation here? It's dead."

A Private nodded in agreement. "Yeah. The rebels can _have_ this dump!"

"You stow that talk Private Yelnats!" barked out Vasquez. A trooper next to the outspoken Private nudged him in the ribs with an elbow.

Wallace smiled wryly to himself – he privately agreed with the man, but he'd be damned if he let them know. You couldn't have troops disagreeing with their orders – that stirred up resent, and he didn't want any of his troopers questioning their orders.

"ONI has not seen fit to tell us grunts just what makes this moon so valuable to them, no," he admitted, causing a chorus of chuckles. "But we don't need to know that. These are rebels – people who have rejected Earth as their government, and are trying to bring down the UNSC. Do you need to know why? No. All you need to know is that the men in our sights are traitors to humanity."

There were a few claps. Wallace was glad of the howling wind around them – he had a feeling that without it, the echoes would have carried for miles.

"Now, get ready to move out! Stow your supplies, pass the ammo 'round, and check your guns. Remember, hot and fast – just the way your mothers like it!"

"Or your fathers!" called one of the women Helljumpers, and the troopers burst out laughing.

Wallace called up the TACMAP again, checking the relative positions of the other troopers. The dropship was still out of range, but the assault groups were about halfway here. The terrain slowed the Warthogs down, but they could still climb over anything they couldn't go around. He wasn't waiting for them, but it was good to know they were on the way regardless.

The two Warthogs were being prepped – someone had managed to graft a couple of the titanium hatches from the SOEIV's onto the front to be used as a battering ram, so that the vehicle itself remained relatively intact. It would make it slower, but a Warthog wasn't exactly a racing car anyway so Wallace didn't care. What he did care about was the guns – the Gauss turret of one and the light anti-air gun of the other would be exposing their gunners during the run up. He'd asked about creating some kind of armour cage, but their technical experts had told him it would take hours to drag the materials from the pods, longer to weld it together, and that it wouldn't be that effective anyway. He just had to hope the vehicles got hit their targets and made it through.

"At least the terrain's good," said Nelson. "Craggy, excellent cover – hell, it's so black we'll even blend in!"

"You want to clamber across it?"

"I didn't say that, Sarge. I just said they wouldn't see us coming."

He looked at his own chronometer. "Post the snipers. We kick this off in fifteen minutes."

* * *

The Pelican launch had been uneventful. They'd kept the stealth systems active anyway, because it never paid to be overly cautious, but the corvettes didn't change course as the Prowler skimmed the moon's atmosphere, disgorged a dropship, and then made a course-correction using its rocket thrusters to bring it back out of its gravity well – an event that, even with stealth, should have been the equivalent of sending up a signal flare.

Calypso tugged at the vacuum suit, getting comfortable. It was a little too big for her, but it was the latest model at any rate, using an EVA helmet that looked like an upended fishbowl. She may look ridiculous, but it gave her a massive field of vision, and that was an advantage in any combat theatre.

The airlock was stark white and black, with red and yellow hazard stripes around the edge of the hatch. There was a tiny window in it, and she could see the corvette rapidly approaching.

The captain may have been uneasy about it, but Calypso was itching to get off the ship and into the fight. This wasn't the fight she'd been expecting, but it was the next best thing – just her, and whatever she found there.

"_Once you board, we'll move out by four hundred kilometres and stay on station," _said Commander Fenworth over the COM._ "Make your way to the ship's black box first – whatever happened, it'll be recorded on there. When you're done, head to the engine room and set off a wild cat destabilisation. When you call for extraction, we'll move in and dock again."_

"And if I can't be extracted, it's out of the debris field when the asteroid hits, right?" Calypso could be quite cynical.

"_Right. Good luck."_

"I make my own luck, ORACLE."

There was a clunk, and then a hiss as the pressure in the airlock adjusted to match that of the corvette.

"Atmosphere seems to be functioning, even if it is a bit over UNSC standard, but it's tolerable. Gravity isn't – you'll be floating until you get to the bridge. You can activate the gravity controls if you want – if you prefer zero-gee combat, then that's fine too."

She snorted. Just because she was good at zero-gravity combat scenarios didn't mean she _enjoyed_ them. She'd fought Jackals and Elites aboard damaged ships, and had barely survived those encounters – she'd be switching the gravity back on as soon as she could, and looked forward to the feeling of something pulling her "down" against the "ground."

The hatch swung open slowly, and Calypso dove out of it into the darkened corridor of the ship beyond it, was caught by the weightlessness, and grabbed a handhold on the wall. There was a moment of space-sickness, and then she got over it.

"I'm in."

The hatch swung shut again, and after a minute there was another, much larger clunk as the Prowler detached itself from the corvette's hull, moving out.

"_Maintain radio contact, and keep the image feed live. I see what you see."_

"Copy that," she muttered, activating the small camera attached to the side of the helmet. She also activated the small flashlight integrated into the helmet – the corridor was dark, the air surprisingly dusty for an environment meant to be kept sterile, and the beams cut through the darkness as if she was underwater.

Oceans had sharks, though. She wondered what she'd find here.

She kicked off against the wall, using her handhold to change her trajectory, swinging herself down the corridor. She held her pistol in one hand, and the chatter that showed a schematic of the ship in the other. If she had to fire, then that would produce recoil and send her flying, so the shot would have to be a good one.

She avoided the elevators – the lights were off, which meant the power was off, and anyway an elevator was just a metal trap. She took a service route – a tiny tunnel burrowing through the beck to the next, meant for maintenance crew or remotely operated service drones. She barely fit through, but she managed the tight squeeze, always keeping the pistol aimed ahead of her.

This corridor looked much like the last one, except that she had company. Globules of blood floated in the air in front of her, alongside the bodies of two of the corvettes crew members. She activated the COM.

"You getting this, ORACLE?"

"_Affirmative, VECTOR. Check the bodies for identification."_

She gently manoeuvred herself to grab one of the corpses, pulling it effortlessly close to her and wrapping a limp arm around a handhold.

"No rigour mortis," she noted. "They've been dead for a few hours."

The jumpsuits they wore were standard issue for naval crew, even among rebel forces – warm, with a lot of pockets. It had been designed to stop microdebris wounds, but that hadn't helped them – whatever had killed them had torn right through it, gouging at their ribcage and abdomen. They'd probably bled out, floating alone and frightened as their attacker moved on through the ship – probably through the service route Calypso had just passed through. She suppressed a shudder.

She looked at the nametag. "It says this one was a Crewman Apprentice Ken Lester."

"_Scan the serial number – we might be able to trace it, notify his family or pick up some "friends" of his."_

She swiped the chatter across it. There was a beep – odd. That shouldn't have happened. She glanced at the chatter.

"It's telling me he's UNSC."

"_Impossible. Check it again."_

She swiped the chatter across the nametag again, annoyed at ORACLE. This wasn't exactly something that you could tamper with – the serial number matched a standard UNSC registry. It came out positive again.

"There's no error, ORACLE. It's telling me he's a UNSC sailor."

There was a pause for a moment. _"They might have stolen the jumpsuits from a naval base, forgotten to remove the tags."_ She didn't sound like she thought it was very likely, and neither did Calypso.

She did the same with the other corpse, noting that this one had a crushed spine. Something had also taken quite a chunk out of the face – it was barely recognisable as Crewman Apprentice Danielle Ulster. The tag also registered as UNSC Navy.

Why had they been here? Had they been together before they died? Sneaking away for a quiet moment together, or perhaps responding to a strange noise? She'd never know. She left the two bodies dangling by their dead arms, and moved on, now very careful to watch the maintenance access corridors.

The door at the end of the corridor was locked when she reached it. She held onto the wall as she plugged an extension from the chatter into it, running a bypass program. There was a dull clunk, but the doors didn't move – she'd just unlocked them. She braced her feet against one of the doors, and pushed – the door shuddered open, scraping against the fitting around it, but opened with enough room for her to pass.

She drifted to move through it – and stopped.

"ORACLE, this is-"

"_Copy that, VECTOR. Find a way around if you can."_

The corridor was filled with bodies, all drifting weightlessly, bumping against each other, blood hanging like some absurd balloon next to them where the wounds had bled. She could see that these people had died instantly – that kind of damage didn't leave any life in a body.

A hand bumped against the bulkhead. The arm it had come from was still drifting in the middle of the room.

She shut the door, quietly and without any emotion showing. It was just her on this ship, but she felt it was important. Rebel or UNSC sailors, nobody deserved this – the chatter beeped again, and the door locked.

She passed through a ventilation shaft, passing up and over the scene of carnage. She was glad there were no windows – the scene played across her mind's eye vividly enough without seeing it again. She felt a wave of claustrophobia sweep through her, and suppressed that too – she wondered whether she'd pop like a shaken soft drink bottle when she got back to the Hunters Arrow.

The rest of the trip was less eventful – the occasional corpse drifting as she passed, trying not to bump against them, but at least they were all in one piece. Mostly, the ship was empty, surprisingly so. She'd expected to see signs of battle everywhere – bullet holes in the walls, torn metal, and a _lot_ more corpses. She remembered that most sailors didn't carry a sidearm, and that weapons were kept in the armoury unless needed – whatever had done this damage must have been damned fast.

The bridge door was ajar already when she reached it – it looked like something had forced its way in. The metal was slightly bent where something had slammed against it, leaving a curved impression. She got a good look at it with the camera – ORACLE might be able to calculate approximate size and mass, which was better than what she knew right now.

The bridge was just as weightless as the rest of the ship, but most of the crew were still strapped into their duty stations, slumped forward across the keypads and screens. She noted with contempt that the captain's chair was empty – he must have tried to get out, leaving the rest of his crew to be killed.

None of the lifepods had been launched, however. His last act of cowardice had been for nought.

"I'm on the bridge. Bringing power back online and switching the gravity back on."

Lights flickered across the bridge as she flicked the switch, and she dropped with a thump to the deck as her weight returned. She felt disoriented again, but got over that as quickly as she'd overcome her space sickness – she'd done this countless times. She was used to the feeling.

She'd kept the lighting restricted to the bridge – the rest of the corvette was still in darkness. No sense in alerting the enemy to her presence, if there were any left, whatever they were. The light was welcome – it made the environment feel less like she was passing through a cemetery. It reflected off the battleship grey walls and reflective screens, bringing a little life back to the place.

The corpses were just as lifeless, but at least the ship still had a pulse.

She knelt down, lowering herself under the control panel in front of the captain's chair. This was a Mako-class corvette, mostly phased out of service in the UNSC, but she was familiar enough with the class that she knew that the black box – the data recorder for all information pertaining to the ship – was stored there. She reached into one of the pouched clipped to her suit, pulling out a pair of wire clippers, cutting through the wires connecting it to the ship's systems – the black box was heavy, and was not actually black, instead favouring a bright fluorescent orange colour for visibility. She wondered to her own amusement why they were called black boxes, and then ignored that – she had a job to do.

She reached out with a hand and clutched at a chair leg, using it to pull herself out while the other hand clutched the black box. And then she wondered where the chair had come from.

It wasn't a chair.

She heard the click of an M6 pistol's safety trigger moving, held by the owner of the leg, and she said the first thing that came to mind.

"Shit."

* * *

Wallace and his troopers moved silently, but swiftly, over the blackened terrain. He'd expected to have to clamber over sharp rocks, duck under low overhands, but it was surprisingly easy to move across. The ground was smooth, but just rough enough for their boots to grip on them.

Technically, he wasn't the one who had to the clambering anyway. He was seated comfortable in one of the Warthogs, submachine gun cradled in his arm. Nelson sat in the driver's seat, and behind them Vasquez manned (or "womanned") the M26 Gauss Cannon, keeping it aimed at the building ahead of them

And, as Corporal Nelson had so astutely pointed out to him, it was so black it made their body armour into the perfect camouflage. This was a first for Wallace. Usually they had to change into different gear if they wanted camouflage – the black ballistic plating that Helljumpers were typically imagined in was technically for urban combat, distinguishing them from the lighter grey of regular Marines or soldiers. He'd never before been in an operation where it blended in, except may be into deep shadows. The Warthogs, in their pale green livery, were the ones that looked out of place here, but the ODST's looked right at home.

There were shadows here, too, but they didn't need them. Deep and dark trenches seemed to roll across the landscape, like an ocean frozen during a storm. Some of the arches looked almost like waves.

They were nearly in position – Wallace activated his COM. "Snipers, take the shot. Warthogs, move up!"

Two sharp cracks would have split the air if they hadn't been wearing helmets. Through his scope, Wallace saw the two snipers slump against the inside of the guard tower – the other guards hadn't yet noticed the death of their comrades, and continued the patrol. They were about to find out.

The two Warthogs roared to life. They'd followed the rest of the troops at a snail's pace as they moved up, but now they left the ODST's in its dust, kicking up showers of pebbles and fragments of fractured obsidian as they tore ahead, their wheels digging in deep for traction.

He was glad of the helmet as Vasquez fired the Gauss turret twice – the first shot hit the guard tower, bringing it falling across the road block. The second shot hit the building, but didn't make much of a dent.

"So much for punching a hole," called Nelson dryly.

"Shut up and drive," Wallace yelled back over the roar of the Warthog's engines. He chambered around in his weapon, adjusting his grip on it.

The gauss turret cracked again, and again, and now the M41 LAAG barked out a staccato of fire as 12.7mm bullets sprayed one of the patrols, men and dogs dropping in the hail of fire. A shot hit the Warthog's windscreen, deflected, but Wallace ducked instinctively and wished, not for the first time, that Warthogs came with roofs.

Vasquez fired another round, this one tearing through the fence and leaving a gaping and smouldering hole through it, slamming into the wall in another place. A guard stared at the Warthog in shock, and then dived out of the way as it barrelled past him.

"Brace for impact!" Nelson yelled, as Vasquez held on for dear life and Wallace gripped the roll bar.

The Warthog had built up a lot of momentum, and shredded its way through the first fence, a simply wall of chain link wire., its carbon nanotube tyres crushing the barbed wire underneath it. The next layer in the perimeter was more difficult – a wall of wooden slats, which the Warthog nevertheless barrelled through, the makeshift battering ram mounted on the front going through it like the hammer of a god.

The third wall was brick – which exploded in a shower of shrapnel as the Warthog burst through it, sending debris into the third patrol, which turned their weapons onto the vehicle even as they dived out of its way.

Wallace fired a burst at a man still reaching for his pistol - the Gauss turret cracked yet again, and two men unfortunate enough to be in her way were turned into an expanding cloud of flesh and blood and gore. Blood slicked the windshield. Nelson gagged. Wallace ignored him.

The Warthog hit the wall – not another fence, but the building, squat and ebony black. The plan had been that either the Gauss turret would punch a hole, or the Warthog would – but it held. The Warthog ground to a crunching halt, jerking all of its occupants forward – Vasquez's restraints snapped, and she sprawled across the top. Wallace was sent flying out of the vehicle, and eventually collected himself enough to realise that he was on his back, out in the open, and his weapon was lying a meter away.

He reached for it, flipped over, and brought down a guard as he aimed a pistol at him. The bullets slammed into his legs and he screamed, falling flat on his face. Another burst to the head made sure he wouldn't get up again. Wallace shakily got to his feet, checking himself to make sure nothing was broken, and then limped over to the Warthog.

Nelson was lying slumped against the wheel. Wallace checked the TEAMBIOS panicked, and was relieved to see that he was just unconscious. Vasquez, on the other hand, had already clambered back into the turret, and sent a pair of gauss rounds slamming into another patrol hurrying into range.

The other Warthog rolled past them, apparently undamaged. It must have seen them hit the building without making a dent, he though ruefully. Its gunner, which Wallace recognised as Corporal Jackson, swerved left to bring the turret to bear on a pair of guard dogs bounding towards Wallace. He raised his own weapon, but it was unnecessary – the dogs yelped and died as the LAAG fired.

""Thanks for the assist, Corporal!"" Jackson jeered as the Warthog rolled on.

The other troopers had caught up now, and were setting to work taking care of the rest of the perimeter guard, submachine guns burping out short bursts, pistols kicking, and a pair of rifles cracking out from the distance as the platoon's snipers picked and brought down their targets. Wallace motioned to a Fireteam.

"You men, on me! Have you got the charges?"

"Yes sir!" the trooper responded, patting a pouch on her body armour. She handed it to Wallace, and the Marines stacked up in front of the door.

"Breach and clear!" he yelled out as the charge went off, the door thumping uselessly backward. He swept the inside with his weapon, fired into the darkness inside, and stepped in.

The guard must have been next to the door, because he was bleeding from his ears – but he was mad as hell, and terrified, and he was Wallace stepping through. He grabbed his knife, clambered onto his back, arm wrapped around his neck, and brought the knife around-

He dropped, bleeding from the middle of his forehead. Wallace gasped for breath, and flashed the trooper who'd saved his life a thumbs-up, and then waved the Fireteam forward. He let them take the lead this time – he was sick of being the first in the enemy's gun sights.

He opened the SQUADCOM channel. "First Squad, secure the perimeter, active patrol. Second Squad, move in, sweep and clear, floor by floor. I want this facility secure by the time the dropship gets here!"

There was a chorus of affirmations, and Marines tumbled through the doorway past Wallace. Outside, Nelson and Vasquez backed the Warthog up, joining the other vehicle. He nodded to them, and then moved further down the hallway into the depths of the building.

* * *

"Who the hell are you?"

Calypso held her hands out in front of her, showing the man she was unarmed. He didn't lower the gun.

"Are you with VENATOR?" he demanded. "Fuckers just sent us out here, no idea what was going on. Are you with them?"

"No," she said slowly and gently, hoping it sounded soothing. "I'm UNSC. Agent VECTOR, Office of Naval Intelligence."

The man snorted in disbelief. "You're a spook? Just as bad."

She frowned at the jibe, but tried to ignore it. "I'm not a spook. I'm just here to retrieve the black box. We just want to know what happened here. Can you tell me?"

The man looked at her for a while. The faceplate was opaque, but she depolarised it so that he could see her face. Humanising someone made it harder to kill them – she hoped.

"If I lower my weapon, you'll…you won't try anything? No sudden movements?"

"Sure." She'd say anything to get him to lower the gun. "Whatever you want."

The man sighed, and sagged, dropping the gun. Her hand whipped out effortless, snatched it mid-fall, twirled it around and pointed it at the man. He just smiled.

"Go ahead. It's empty."

She slid the magazine out, and cursed as she saw that it was. Her other hand came out with her own pistol.

"You can do that if you want, but without me you'll never know what happened here." He smiled at her, not smugly, just amused. "And I'm not going to give you any trouble if you can get me off here."

The gun stayed aimed at him, unwavering…and then she lowered it, clicked the safety back on, and held out her other hand.

"Could you help a lady up?"

The man leant down, held her hand firmly, and heaved her out from under the control panel, and now she could get a proper look at him

He wasn't tall, but he looked imposing. A few days' growth of facial hair gave his face a rugged look, but he was old enough to pull it off – some of his hairs were white, and the rest was grey. He wore a plain grey jumpsuit, with simple insignia that named him –Olars, J. Captain.

She pulled herself up, holstering her pistol, and took off her helmet. Captain Olars' eyes widened as he saw her without her helmet, and he coughed nervously.

"Er, sorry about that miss. But I've been holed up her for…I don't know how long. And for a moment I thought you might have been one of…_them_."

The emphasis on the last word made her shiver. "Them? Who? VENATOR?"

He shook his head. "No. Do you know what VENATOR is?"

She shook her head. "All we were told was that someone was conducting research on the moon, and we were to go in and investigate."

"Well," he said, "if you're up here then you aren't down there. That's something to be thankful for, at least."

She decided to keep quiet about the Helljumpers, at least for now. "Captain, what went on here? Who are you?"

He slumped back down into his chair, face in his hands. He wasn't crying, but she worried that he might start. "Captain Joshua Olars, UNSC _Fenris Wolf_. Sorry about the…mess," he said, sweeping a hand across the bridge apologetically at his former crew. "I thought about moving them, but I didn't see any point.

"We got told this was an ONI base. The only name we were given was "Project VENATOR", and we got told that anything else was way above our clearance level. We were meant to carry a shipment of new personnel, sixty people, all stored in the cryotubes. When we tried to thaw them after we jumped in-system, they stopped us – that was our first hint that something was wrong.

"We dropped off the cryotubes on the moon's surface, and then climbed back into orbit…but something must have got onboard. Next thing we know, the _Rising Sun_ was sending out a mayday – all we could hear on the COMs was screaming. The _Beetle_ moved in, docked, sent in its Marine fire teams – we lost contact with them both after an hour. We talked about trying to help them, but we decided it was too risky. And then the Pelican came out."

He tapped a few controls on his chair, and the display screen flickered to life. It showed the inky blackness of space, two battleship grey corvettes, and a tiny dot – the rocket thrusters of a Pelican dropship. Calypso frowned. "Why didn't they use a lifepod?"

"That's what we wondered, too. I was already suspicious, so I stationed guards in the hangar – not enough, apparently, because whatever was in there just tore through them. And then it went through the rest of the ship."

Calypso felt her finger itching to reach for the pistol. This was making her twitchy, and she needed to be on form for…whatever it was.

"Did you get a look at it?" she asked. "Video cameras? Surveillance? Sensors?"

He shook his head. "It doesn't show up on thermals, and it was too damn fast for a visual. Motion trackers worked, but you can't get a picture from that. I saw it though…" he stopped.

She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and he flinched. The hand stayed. "Go on, sir. How did you respond?"

His voice sounded strangely strangled now. "We…we tried to lure it back into the hangar. Crewmen Laskey and Sanders used themselves as bait. A couple of the things attacked them, and we flushed the room – but there more on the ship. They were multiplying. I don't know how. And then the Marines started firing outside the bridge…"

She could see this was traumatic, going over how his crew was slaughtered. The man seemed like an upstanding officer, and had plainly done his best in impossible circumstances. That only made it all the worse, though.

"They attacked the bridge?"

"Yeah. The Marines tried to weld the doors shut, but they weren't fast enough. They bludgeoned their way through, grabbed the Marines, dragged them through…I don't know what happened to them. And then they came in."

He shuddered as he recalled, his shiver sweeping through his entire body. "They were…black. As black as space. Maybe two meters tall, maybe a little more. There was a tail. That's all I saw, before the little ones ran in-"

"Little ones?" she asked. "What little ones?"

He shrugged, and rubbed his chest with his hand. "They were small, maybe two hand-widths, and had tails. The big ones just went crazy, killed some…but the little ones got the rest. Clamped onto their faces."

She looked around them at the dead bridge crew. None of them were alive now – there was no decomposition yet, but the gaping wounds still didn't look or smell good. She turned back to the captain.

"How did you escape?" she asked.

"I didn't."

The scream seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and Olars' back arched in the chair. He gritted his teeth, fixed her in a stare, and yelled, "Get away! It'll go for you too!"

"What? What will?"

He screamed again, and she heard his crash webbing tear as he strained against it – and then she realised it wasn't the crash webbing.

Something was moving around under Olars' skin, inside the chest. She watched in fascinated horror as it thumped against the ribs – she heard them cracking – and, with a spurt of blood, burst through. The captain convulsed a few times, blood trickling out of his mouth, and then was still.

It was black. It was small. It seemed to be all elongated head and teeth. And even though it had no eyes, she could sense it looking at her. It bared its teeth.

She screamed, raised the pistol and pulled the trigger. Three shots echoed around the room – none of them missed.

Outside, deep in the bowels of the ship, something screamed back at her.


	2. Darkened Shadows

_Halo is a copyrighted franchise of Microsoft Corporation and 343 Industries and "Alien" is a copyrighted franchise of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. No claim of ownership over any characters, places, events or items that are not original is asserted. Many thanks to my fellow members of Halo Fanon for being just generally awesome, especially Matt-256 for lending me the character of Helen Calypso. And, as they say, read and review!_

**1644 HOURS, 27TH SEPTEMBER, 2557 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / "RAPTORS NEST" SITE, DROPSHIP TANGO ONE-FOUR-NINER "VENOM," ORBITAL INSERTION**

Andrew held the handhold clamp on the ceiling, an assault rifle slung across his back, gently swaying as the Pelican made tiny course corrections. For all intents and purposes, he looked calm, still and serene – underneath that façade, he was anything but.

He was a Spartan, and had fought the enemies of Earth and humanity for more than thirty years – first the disparate but determined rebels who had fought for their independence, and then the numerically superior and technologically advanced Covenant – he had made insertions under hails of anti-air fire, dodging past enemy fighters and gunboats, weaving around (or at) capital ships, or making landings near legions of enemy troops. He was alive now because he knew the risks of every movement, and knew precisely how and when he could balance them to maximise his team's effectiveness and minimise casualties. He was good at it, and it had become an instinct.

Right now, he was fighting to override that instinct. Every fibre of his body was telling him that any moment now, they'd be hit by a plasma mortar or a rebel missile, or would have to duck out of the way – hence why he kept one hand firmly planted on the handhold. But no fire came up, no fighters launched, and no ships appeared in orbit – this insertion was quiet so far, eerily so.

He had learnt a bit of logic during his training for the SPARTAN-II Program, and he knew about inductive arguments – that just because something _hadn't_ happened yet, didn't mean it _wouldn't_. He overrode the instinct, but he didn't suppress it. Not totally.

The dropship's intercom crackled, and the pilot's voice came through. _"Five minutes ETA to the LZ, Indigo. Suit up and grab your gear if you haven't already, over. "_

"Affirmative Venom. Circle over the area once we disembark, sweeping with thermals and motion trackers for anything out of the ordinary – I don't want any surprises. Over."

"_Copy that Indigo One. Sensors active, weapons armed, over."_

He envied his teammates, both of whom were calmly making the final adjustments to their gear, Laura swapping the optical scope of her BR55HB-SR for a digital smart-linked scope, Jeremy running a belt of 12.7mm High-Explosive Armour-Piercing rounds into his M247H Heavy Machinegun.

Laura was Indigo Team's scout – he'd heard an ONI officer call her "silent as the grave" once, and had quietly smiled to himself under his helmet because it fit her perfectly. She was absolutely silent, and excelled at stealth work. She also doubled as their technical specialist, as well as their sniper and sharpshooter – as well as the battle rifle, a SRS99C-S2AM sniper rifle was slung across her back, and an M99 "Stanchion" SARS lay next to her, waiting calibration for the high velocity rounds it used. Her throat had been crushed in augmentation and while the doctors had managed to save her life, they hadn't saved her life, and Doctor Catherine Halsey had been reluctant to accept a mute as the ubermenschean ideal of her perfect "Spartans" – fortunately, someone had shared no such reluctance, and she had been quietly reassigned to Indigo. She had been the first.

Then there was Jeremy. He'd technically _died_ during augmentation, his heart stopping on the operating table. The doctors had tried, and failed, to revive him and he was declared legally dead after half an hour of resuscitation – only to revive to the stunned horror of the morgue attendants, alarmed and still adjusting to his augmentations, but no worse the wear. Doctor Halsey had never even learnt of his survival – the coffin provided for the funeral service was a dummy, provided by Indigo's organisers.

Jeremy and Laura had both trained together, and they had been close to another Spartan, one who had passed the augmentation process – Andrew. He hadn't known it at the time, but he'd been approached by an ONI agent, who raised the subject of the "failures" and their fate – it had angered him. The thought of so many people he had known, men and women (still technically boys and girls) who had courage and devotion and professionalism who had been rejected just because they were physically imperfect – after the man had gone, he'd quietly mused to himself that "repairing" and reconditioning the Spartans would have been almost as laborious and expensive as training a new batch, but the UNSC _owed_ them! Kidnapped as children, re-educated and trained to be mentally and physically superior to any human in existence, all in the name of the security of the colonies from rebel strike? The UNSC owed them this, and it had passed on that responsibility.

When he had been approached next, Andrew figured out who the man worked for, and why he had picked him. And he had agreed on the spot.

Since then, they had fought through thirty years of hell – shutting down human terrorist cells or assassinating dissenters who, even in the face of Covenant annihilation, openly denounced the oppression of the UNSC. He hadn't enjoyed it, because even though he'd been trained as a soldier he still knew that every life was precious, and that when you took one you lost something else. But he had felt a grim satisfaction in his work – he was neat, efficient, and had a knack for accounting for every variable. Some had called him overly cautious, but none could argue with the results – a confirmed kill count in the _thousands,_ a mission success ratio of more than 90%, all by a three-person team. Things rarely went wrong on Indigo Team's operations.

When he had started to fight against the Covenant, though, he had discovered an enemy where any inhibition, and reluctance to pull the trigger, disappeared, both in them and in _him._ And as the years wore on, they found fewer and fewer rebels were willing to oppose the UNSC – either forced into an uneasy alliance with their former hated enemies, or wiped out by the Covenant. It had felt good facing enemies that were inhuman. He felt no sympathy for their way of life, he felt no impulse to learn their motivations or convictions to better understand them, because their actions were incomprehensible – and he had revelled in the moral and spiritual freedom this had allowed him.

It felt strange facing an enemy that was human again. After thirty years of war, there were so few humans left to rebuild that it somehow felt wrong. He could tell himself that they had rejected the UNSC, that they were morally reprehensible and in some cases genocidal, and that was all true – but it didn't let the feeling of unease in Andrew pass. He set it aside, and tried to ignore it.

Jeremy looked up from feeding the last round into the machinegun. "You think this is going to be another bug hunt?" he asked in his Russian accent, using the Marine colloquialism for an operation against aliens.

Andrew shrugged, not an easy manoeuvre in Mark V MJOLNIR Powered Armour. "Given the Intel we had on the enemy, we should have encountered more resistance than this by now. We haven't'. Either the Intel was wrong, or some thing's changed."

Laura shook her head, and signed, So either ONI screwed up or the enemy did. Great.

Laura had worked hard to overcome her speech impediment – she was fluent in dozens of forms of sign language in a number of languages, both civilian and military, and had a rapid text transmission system integrated into her neural interface – they'd experimented with audio translations, but she'd preferred the silence and clarity of hard text. Naturally, both Andrew and Jeremy had thrown themselves at the task of learning the sign language, so that they could all communicate fluently in total silence – the Spartan military signals had been joined by a whole new vocabulary that was alien and strange.

Andrew smiled grimly to himself. "This changes nothing. We go in hot, fast and silent, check the place out, and then make our report to ORACLE. With any luck, the rebels dropped the ball on this one."

Jeremy chuckled. "So we'll have ourselves a shooting gallery? That's fine by me," he said, patting his weapon.

Jeremy could be remarkable uncomplicated. He did not share Andrew's ethical dilemma, for one thing – human or alien, if it posed a threat to him, his team, or the UNSC, he neutralised it with prejudice.

"Remember," Andrew reminded them both. "If we can, we take prisoners – whatever was going on here, ONI wants to know what it was and who was involved, especially Section Zero. Selective targeting, verbal warnings, and checking of prisoners for weapons, bugs or booby traps."

Jeremy waved a hand dismissively. "Ja, ja, we know. We'll treat them like cuddly teddy bear, all soft and mushy."

Given the capabilities of MJOLNIR, that last part was a reality. Andrew flashed Jeremy a Spartan smile, swiping a thump and finger across his visor in imitation of an upward curved mouth.

The COM crackled again. _"Coming up on the LZ, Indigo. Looks like they've rolled out the welcome wagon."_

"Hostiles?" he asked, absent-mindedly checking the magazine of his MA5C rifle, adjusting the electronics suite.

"_Friendlies – or as friendly as ODST's can be. Circling the LZ now."_

Andrew peered out of one of the troop bay viewing portals – even from this height he could make out the figures of Helljumpers standing on the helipad that had been designated as the landing zone. It was technically part of the rebel airfield, except that there _was_ no airfield anymore, courtesy of the ODST's. The dropship curved around the platform, sensors on active sweep and, from his vantage point, he could see the wing-mounted machineguns twitch as they activated.

"_Beginning descent, Indigo. Give 'em hell out there, over."_

The three Spartans moved to the back of the pelican as the ramp lowered, stepping down the short gap. It was a titanium/vanadium platform, meant to take the weight of at least one dropship or helicopter, and it still shuddered as the combined weight of three Spartans hit it.

"Roger that Venom. Transfer the tactical data, and make another pass. We'll call you if we need you. Out."

Indigo turned to the ODST's as the Pelican curved up and over them. Andrew's helmet-mounted display projected a tiny corporal insignia, headed by "R. Jackson."

"Thanks for the reception, corporal."

The man nodded rather than saluting, standard practice in a combat theatre. "Sergeant Wallace wishes he could be here himself, but he's been otherwise engaged. He hopes you will find your accommodations comfortable, and enjoy your stay in Hotel Hell."

Jeremy shrugged. "The fan's broken in my room. Someone want to fix it?"

Jackson grinned. "I'll see if we have a spare room available. Until then, your limousines await!" he finished, making a dramatic sweep of his arm towards the two Warthog Troop Transports.

Jeremy chuckled, clapping a hand warmly on the man's shoulder as he passed. The Helljumpers had been tensed up before, but now they were talking, laughing to themselves – Jeremy often had that effect on people. Sometimes Andrew thought it was a liability, and others he considered it a strength.

Andrew and Laura exchanged a look. She shook her head, he shrugged. And then they climbed into the Warthogs.

* * *

Calypso backed away from the corpse, smoke still billowing from the barrel. The wound in the corpse still smouldered from the bullet holes, and now the blood was flowing freely. The…_thing_…hung out, limp, draped across broken ribcage and torn flesh.

If ORACLE ordered her to check it for identification, she would tell the bitch where to stick it.

She made sure the COM channel was still active, and asked, "Did you get all of that?"

"_Affirmative, VECTOR."_ ORACLE's voice sounded muted, shaky – Calypso didn't blame her. _"I've got it all. Don't touch the corpse – if this thing is transferable, I don't want to lose you too."_

_Mighty kind of you,_ she thought sarcastically. Out loud she said, "Copy that." She wouldn't have gone near it with a ten foot pole.

"_Have you ever seen anything like it, ORACLE?"_

Yes, she thought. The Flood. A race more horrifying than any Lovecraftian abomination. But this was different, in a way that was much more frightening. She'd fought Elites and Brutes, Drones and Grunts, and the Flood felt _totally_ alien that was almost comforting – as if nothing like that could ever actually evolve on its own. But this thing had burst out of Olar's chest like a wasp larva chewing its way out of a caterpillar – it felt almost "natural".

She knew nature produced killers, but whatever world had produced this thing must have been something from a nightmare.

"No," she finally said. "Nothing I've ever seen comes close."

"_I'm declaring threat code HYDRA, bioweapon threat – we'll blow the ship with archer missiles and advise the ground forces that they might run into these things."_

"And what about me?"

There was a moment of silence. Calypso knew spooks – right now, she knew, ORACLE was wondering if it was worth retrieving her and risking allowing whatever had slaughtered three corvettes onto her ship. She was a spook, and that was how they worked – weighing up odds, considering all factors, and then making the play that did the least damage for maximum gain.

Hell, _she_ wouldn't risk it if the positions were reversed.

"_Hit a lifepod. We'll scan it for lifesigns before we pick it up, make sure that it's just you."_

Did those things even register as "life"? Captain Olars had said the _beetle_ had moved to help its sister ship, the _Rising Sun_ – presumably they'd conducted their own scans. He'd said it didn't show up on infrared imaging – did that apply to other sensors?

"I have an EVA suit," she said out aloud.

"_What about it, VECTOR?"_

She took a breath, hardly believing she was suggesting this. "If I use a lifepod, we risk one of them getting aboard the Prowler. I can set the engines to blow and then I'll just bail out, get as far as my oxygen supply will allow, and wait for pickup. If it's just me, then I'll know if there's anything on me."

There was another pause, but shorter. _"Do it. Get to one of the hangars, vent the atmosphere, and ride the vacuum out. Make sure none of those things follow you."_

Calypso grabbed her helmet, jamming it back over her head and re-sealing the collar. She kept her pistol unholstered – if there more of those things, she'd be ready. They might be small, but she was a dead-eye shot. She hesitated for a moment, and then approached the corpse of Captain Olars, and closed his eyes. She paused again, trying not to look at the puncture wound, and then took his pistol too – she'd need all the firepower she could get.

Speaking of firepower…

She ran through a rough schematic of the corvette in her mind, remembering that the ship's armoury. She had no idea how many of the things were aboard the ship, but she had seen relatively few corpses. She had to assume that those who had not been killed outright had suffered the same fate as Captain Olars - which meant that there could be dozens of creatures roaming the ship. If she was going to be making her way through the ship on her own, then she'd rather do so armed.

The gravity and lighting were still shut off outside the bridge, and Calypso drifted down the corridor to the armoury, flashlight jerking around at the tiniest noises, real and imagined. The doors here were also locked, and she set the datapad to unlatch it and pulled the door back, tentatively nosing her gun through the gap – no response. She opened it wider, peering into it.

The room was neat, everything packed away. The crew hadn't been prepared for what had killed them – they hadn't even had time to reach the armoury to defend themselves. She floated into the room, careful to close the door behind her, and moved to a rack of rifles, slinging a battle rifle onto her back, clipping ammunition for the rifle and the pistols to her vacuum suit. She considered for a moment, and then picked up a shotgun, clipping a couple of boxes of shells – better to be prepared for all eventualities.

She had considered activating the lighting and gravity for the ship, but she had reconsidered. While it was dark, and she'd have to keep track of her momentum and the kickback of her weapons, the enemy would also have to worry about the same things. The weight of her mobile arsenal also might be prohibitive – weightless, she could float at her leisure. She slung on a thrust-pack from a maintenance rack, which would allow her to forego the handhold and compensate for recoil.

Thus armed, she set off down another corridor, flashlight shining into the darkened spaces.

"ORACLE, can you get a secure uplink to the ships cameras? I'd _really_ like some eyes watching over me."

"Affirmative VECTOR, just attach the datapad to a camera and I can remotely access the whole system."

She tapped the thruster controls, floating up to the nearest camera. She grimaced when she saw it up close – it was mangled, dangling by a wire. But at least the uplink port was still intact.

There was a pause as ORACLE worked, and then, _"I'm in. Accessing camera hub now. There's…a lot of cameras have been destroyed. Deck four is totally dark, but you don't need that, or decks one and two. I can remote access the airlocks and hatches, try and seal the bastards where they are, but you still need to move through deck three – and I can't seal off the access vents and maintenance shafts. They're on a separate system."_

"That's fine. Can you get eyes on these things?"

"_Working… my god…"_

"What's wrong?" ORACLE was an ONI agent, and spooks didn't get "spooked" easily – that was the whole rationale behind the nickname. "ORACLE, talk to me!"

"_Getting you a visual uplink. There's no light, and it's hard to make out, but you'll see it."_

A small part of the visor sectioned itself off from the rest of her helmet display, buzzed with static for a moment, and then went dark. She activated visual enhancement – thermal and ultraviolet. Inside her helmet, her eyes widened with shock.

It wasn't small – it was more than two meters from head to foot, with a tail at least as long as that. It looked like a skeleton walking, bony and knobbly, and indescribably _lithe_, as if it were some kind of alien ballerina. It was blurry on the UV imaging, and thermal imaging didn't pick it up at all, but she know that it would be black – as black as the backdrop of space.

It had no eyes, but it looked up at the camera. It snarled.

It leapt.

Static.

"Jesus…"

She swore again to herself, reversing the video, freezing it on one frame – the creature just before it struck, snarling, poised about to spring. It looked as powerful as a tiger, and as fierce.

Just a handful of them had slaughtered an entire ship's crew. And they'd been breeding since then, using the survivors to gestate their young in…and, if she had to guess, as food afterwards.

God damn it.

"_VECTOR, ship security is picking up at least a dozen of these things throughout the ship. Keep in mind that they've destroyed some of the cameras already, and others don't have the UV filter, so I have no idea how many are actually there – motion trackers are showing constant movement. It could be crawling in the things."_

She looked down at the pistols, which now looked pathetically underpowered in her hands. She holstered them, drawing the assault rifle, pulling the charging lever and ramming a round into the receiver.

"I'll be careful. I've done this a dozen times with Covies."

"_Covenant don't exactly burst out of your chest."_

"Not helping," she said, grimacing.

"I'll stand by, keep an eye on you with the sensors. Get to engineering, set it to blow, and then get to the hangar – that's all the advice I can give you."

Darkened corridors loomed forward and back, and even with her thrust pack gently propelling her along them, she still missed the tug of gravity. She had to hope her enemies were just as uncomfortable in zero-G as she was.

She set off.

* * *

The journey from the landing pad to the facility wasn't long, maybe forty minutes. But it was bumpy, even for a Warthog, and the terrain around them could only be described in terms such as _stark_ or _bleak_. The black landscape rolled on in all directions across the horizon for infinity.

It reminded Andrew of a painting of hell he had once seen – black, foreboding, and indescribably evil.

He ignored it, focussing on the mission ahead. Spartans were good at that – putting the needs of the mission ahead of personal indulgence. He could hear the ODST's joking and laughing with each other, and that was how they dealt with it. Jeremy sounded like he was joining in, but Andrew knew all three Spartans were privately contemplating their part of the mission.

The ODST's had done well, surprisingly well after what they had suspected about this site, but this was still just phase one – eradicating the external guards, to give themselves a foothold. If the data hadn't been wrong about the corvettes, they should be expecting rebel reinforcements any time now, but they had remained silent and inert in space, still drifting. Last Andrew had heard, Calypso had been successfully sent aboard by the Prowler to investigate. He wished her luck with that, and put it out of his mind – not his problem, even if it did affect his approach to it.

Phase two was the _real_ penetration – the top floors of the facility were the exterior, but orbital imaging had indicated that most of the structure was underground – the ONI analysts had predicted a maximum of thirteen floors, minimum of seven, standard procedure for colonies with high radiation levels to minimise exposure. This place wasn't a colony, and he doubted anyone would _want_ to terraform a rock like this, so he'd treat that Intel as suspect until he could confirm it.

What he did know from firsthand experience was that the rebels would be defending their positions further down, trying to repel any advance the ODST's attempted. The Helljumpers were tough and good at what they did, but the rebel forces would have the advantage of intimate knowledge of their environment, access to locks and other obstacles, not to mention setting up choke points with multiple fields of fire to catch the attackers in kill zones.

That was where Indigo team came in. They'd take care of the defences the ODST's couldn't, and bear the brunt of the counter-assault. And they would push deeper, until they could secure the entire facility.

The fact that the rebel corvettes would not be providing orbital support or fire was an unexpected bonus – the ODST's had originally been meant to fend off the external threats, allowing Andrew and his team to focus on the internal ones. On the one hand, he now had additional manpower at his disposal – on the other hand, he couldn't keep control of the entire platoon in such an enclosed space. He hoped their commanding officer could.

As it turned out, their commanding officer was not an officer – and was familiar to Andrew.

"Sergeant Wallace," Andrew said as the Warthog rolled to a halt, allowing him to disembark – the Warthog rocked a little as half a ton of MJOLNIR was relieved from its burden. "It's good to see you."

The Helljumper smiled through his depolarised faceplate. "Good to see you too, Chief. CP's inside, we're still setting it up. And then there's something else I want to show you."

The structure was squat and black, like the landscape, as if it was meant to fit in – the fact that the radiation-resistant material that swathed the building was standard colonial issue, even if the reinforcement was not, and showed up on sensors from orbit, made that unlikely, but it was fitting nonetheless.

"It took us a while to figure out what was defending the station – the walls are thin, but a gauss gun doesn't even scratch them," Sergeant Wallace explained as the Warthogs pulled away. "Turns out they weren't even touching the damn thing – there's an energy shield surrounding the whole building."

"It lets low-velocity objects through, but stops high-velocity objects, such as bullets or cannon fire?" Andrew asked. He knew about shields – his armour used them to great effect.

"Or a Warthog ramming it at top speed. Bit my tongue. They're going to pay for that."

Andrew looked over the building again, but there was no telltale nearly invisible haze or shimmer. "You switched it off," he noted.

"Yeah. Corporal Vasquez took out the control bunker, finally switched the damn thing off."

The two men, followed by Laura and Jeremy animatedly conversing in sign language, entered the structure. The perimeter guards straightened, but Andrew couldn't tell if it was from respect for him or their sergeant, or disgust. Spartans got a lot of that from Helljumpers.

The Command Post was a hive of activity. Portable computer terminals and work stations had been brought over via Warthog, salvaged from the SOEIV pods, and Marines were running diagnostic checks on them, activating radio communications gear to supplement their limited field-armour issue, and otherwise hacking into the enemy's systems.

"What kind of security protection do they have?" Andrew asked, nodding to a terminal.

Wallace shrugged. "Nothing a Black Widow can't sort out."

Andrew was impressed now. "Black Widow" was an extremely advanced military virus, used for infiltration and encryption in the field – able to crack virtually any enemy encryption scheme, hiding its tracks so that it was nearly invisible, semi-sentient and therefore able to adapt and mutate to meet most threats or create new defences. He'd heard it had been developed by Doctor Halsey, the creator of the SPARTAN-II Program, head of MJOLNIR, and the UNSC's foremost mind in AI research before her disappearance in 2552. It was also highly classified, and therefore a sign of just how badly ONI wanted to see this place.

Just what was in here that was worth a Prowler, a platoon of Helljumpers, three Spartans, a Trojan, and the most advanced "dumb" AI in the UNSC?

"Sensors online," reported an ODST technician. "Creating tactical map of the structure."

Another piece of equipment flickered, glowed for a second and then projected a holographic three-dimensional floor plan of the building. The ODST's in the building crowded around the projection.

ONI had been bang on the money – "for once," noted Wallace – thirteen floors, though only the top seven had cameras. They could see the rebel troops setting up defences, setting up killzones, and otherwise getting themselves busy for a defensive operation. No elevators – any special forces team knew how to cut the cables and rappel down the convenient tunnel. The stairwells were perfect choke points.

Something was wrong though.

"what are they doing?" asked one of the ODST's. "We're up here, not down there!"

The enemy troops were carrying out their business…facing the wrong way. The barricades were set up at the top of the stairwells, facing back – as though they were expecting something to come up them. The bottom floors were crowded with troops, and even on the fuzzy display from the security camera Andrew could see the fear and nervousness – but not of them.

"Sir?"

Andrew shrugged, a comforting gesture. "Whatever they're doing, they're leaving themselves wide open. Lock and load troopers – we kick this party off with a bang in fifteen!"

Helljumpers may resent being overshadowed by Spartans, but even these troopers exchanged a few knowing looks. They knew Indigo team – this particular squad from the 506th ODST Battalion had fought alongside them a few times, on Minorca, Ares, and Unmoving Virtue. They knew what to expect, and what they expected was a slaughter.

Andrew looked at the hologram of terrified soldiers sacrificing their rear guard to protect against whatever was below them. What did they think was down there that was worse than a platoon of Helljumpers?

The lights flickered off.

An explosion rocked the structure.

* * *

Claustrophobia. Normally it wasn't something Calypso suffered from, but with this ship she'd make an exception.

Most corvettes were about frigate-size, but with only one of the usual twin-pronged bow struts that were iconic of frigates. Even on a light warship, that was a lot of mass and internal space, which were filled by a three-dimensional labyrinth of corridors and vents. Most of these were empty, though her eyes caught the echoes of life – a dropped spanner, a smear of blood across a wall, occasionally a corpse that must have been too mangled to use. When she came to locked doors, she went through vents, crawling through the tight spaces. Tight ventilation shafts and maintenance ducts - that didn't help matters. Neither did the weightlessness.

What was worse was the fact that she knew exactly where the creatures were. Everywhere. She could hear them clattering against bulkheads, shrieking down corridors, and occasionally she caught sight of gaping holes in the bulkhead that had been made by something burning through them. If these things could _spit acid_, then she was glad she'd loaded herself up with heavier ammunition.

"_Good news and bad news, VECTOR."_

Great. "Good news first."

"_You're nearly at engineering. In the next corridor, then through the hatch."_

"And the bad news?"

"_I can't make anything out beyond this corridor. Something's interfering with the sensors."_

Even better.

She called up the TACMAP. Really, she didn't need ORACLE to tell her she was near engineering – as a TROJAN supersoldier, she had better than average memory, and she had already memorised the three-dimensional schematics of the ship – she also had the tact not to point this out. But the TACMAP was still important – it was linked to the ship's sensors and cameras, which she _did_ need.

It was not a pretty sight. It wasn't a sight at all.

The corridor was dark. Too dark for visuals. She switched to thermal imaging – and grimaced in frustration as it went even darker. Nothing on infrared, and the barest of blips on the motion tracker. She'd be going in blind, both metaphorically and literally.

Well, the Elites had a saying: "shine light into the dark places."

She drew her assault rifle and shotgun, and gently nudged the hatch open.

This was not a corridor. It was something out of hell. Whatever the things had done to it, it was now…she didn't know how to describe it. Black, but not of darkness – it seemed just to suck the light from the air itself. If there had been light – the new covering of the walls enclosed over the usual light source. Her eyes scraped up every ounce of light – a normal human would have been totally blind. As it was, she was just _mostly_ blind.

Not blind enough. She saw the creatures, outlined in the sliver of light that shone around the cracks of the door.

They must have been posted as sentries. The hatch was open, either opened by the aliens themselves or left open after the attack. They must be guarding it – which meant that whatever was through it was worth guarding. Right where she needed to be.

She saw them lift their heads, sniffing the air. She saw them turn.

Looking at her.

She fired.

The first burst was with the assault rifle, an old MA5B. It sprayed loosely across the corridor, thudding into the wall and hitting one for the creatures. It howled in pain but mostly in surprise as the force of the shots sent it spinning in the null gravity. She shot with the shotgun, a spray of buckshot catching the other, sending it bouncing off the ensconced bulkhead, hissing in hatred. She had braced herself within the duct, keeping her position – she kicked off, sailing through the air, past the alien creatures, rifle and shotgun already slung on her back.

She drew her pistols as she passed the creatures, arms outstretched – two shots each weapon, right into the head, armour-piercing bullets passing through the creatures' heads, sending showers of eerie gore splattering onto the walls, where they bubbled fiercely.

Right past them, through the open bulkhead.

She hit the wall of the corridor beyond, feeling the hard knobbly protrusions and curved ribbing through the hard metal exoskeleton. She could hear shrieking down the corridors – she had evidently roused more than just the sentries.

"_Nice shots."_

"I thought you were blind?" she asked, irritated.

"_Muzzle flash - lit you up with each shot. Composite imaging. Nothing too complicated."_

She could make out movement further down, and fired her pistols down it, hearing a roar as they hit something. She gritted her teeth, kicking off again, sailing down the corridor, passing a crumpled mass of black and green as it bubbled through the deck, carefully dodging past a globule of whatever passed for the thing's blood.

"Cut to the chase, ORACLE. As you can't see, I'm a little busy."

"_As long as there are sensors in the room, every time you fire a shot I can build up a composite image of the corridor. Maybe I can build up a profile on these things, but more importantly I can give you their positions. Especially when the spaces start getting wider."_

"Do that. Just as long as it doesn't distract me."

There was a mirthless chuckle at the other end. _"Your powers of concentration astound me, VECTOR."_

She hit the end of the corridor, angling herself to kick off again, changing her trajectory.

"Then let's get this bug hunt started."

* * *

Numbers, letters, and strange and arcane symbols scrolling down a screen. Frankly, Commander Fenworth was glad she'd never wanted to be a mathematician. Even in the 26th Century, new symbols were still being devised to account for new rules. And slipspace made the whole matter even more confusing.

She didn't need to know what they meant, though – only that they were a sign of progress.

"You have familiarised yourself with the systems?" she asked out loud.

The holopad in front of her shimmered, a shadow forming – inky black, with a tall, wide-brimmed hat and a white, smiling face leering out from beneath it. The figure nodded its head in acknowledgement.

"During our journey through Slipspace, my dear Commander. I must say, UNSC electronics have upgraded considerably since my…incarceration. I barely fit within the mainframe."

She smiled thinly. "Don't push your luck."

The hologram swept its hat off, letting shoulder-length hair fall around his head as he bowed low. "Of course, my dear. Merely testing the resources available to me."

She sighed. Fenworth had really hoped she could avoid turning to him, but the AI was her only available lead right now.

Contact with the surface had never been considered – the electrical storms that raged within its upper atmosphere might just darken the sky for the surface teams, but it formed a wall even UNSC COM gear could only penetrate sporadically and with limited success. And right now, VECTOR was busy with her own operations. Neither team was in a position to provide her with the answers she so desperately needed.

And so she had finally activated Puppet Master.

The AI cocked its head, pantomiming impatience. "Was there something in particular you wished to ask, Commander?"

"The installation."

"You should have already found it. I uploaded the blueprints – your surface teams should have them now, all the better to help their capture of the facility."

"The facility itself isn't what I'm asking about, Puppet Master. I want to know what it was doing."

The AI seemed to grow darker. It should have been impossible for shadows to form around it, the holotank being in a brightly lit room, but he receded into murky blackness, leaving only his…face exposed.

"If I knew what it was doing, I would have told your superiors, Agent Fenworth."

She glared. "Don't get familiar with me, Puppet Master. My superiors may not have told me everything, but you did. And I want to know what you told them."

The AI was silent for a few seconds – a carefully calculated insult. Most humans would assume that it was taking the time to think, weighing its options. But it had already made up its mind before she'd even given him the order.

"Biological weapons research," he said finally. "Studying the effects of contagions on populations. _Enemy_ populations," he amended, before Fenworth could raise an objection. "This was hardly another CHISEL."

She frowned. "What kind of 'contagion'," she asked.

"Biological."

"Artificial or natural?"

"Uncertain."

Her frown deepened. "And what does that mean?"

The shadowy figure darkened further. Obviously it was meant as a psychological barrier – with no face to emote with, this was the AI's way of maintaining a poker face. And he wanted her to know it. The damn thing was toying with her.

As a kid, she'd broken all her toys. This one would be no different.

"What do you mean, 'uncertain'?" she repeated.

The AI seemed suddenly distracted. It tilted its head as though hearing something else, another conversation. And it looked up at her.

If it made any sense, on that unmoving smiling face, it suddenly seemed alarmed.

"Something has happened, Commander. Perhaps we should cut this short?"

She felt her blood turn to ice. An AI wouldn't lie – not directly. That didn't mean it couldn't obfuscate, conceal the truth, misdirect, or even ignore facts, but the alarm was genuine. And if it was enough to alarm Puppet Master, then it had to be big.

"There's been an explosion."

* * *

Helljumpers coughed as dust filled the air, fogging up the already dark room. Andrew cut through it with his night vision, bathing the room in an eerie green glow. He steadied a trooper who looked like he was about to fall, a few cuts and bruises around his unprotected face – he'd taken the helmet off to cool down, or to see a screen, or to do something else the cumbersome equipment hindered.

Stupid. Sloppy. Something that could have got the man killed.

"Easy, Private Yelnats," he said, his helmet display readily supplying the man's name and rank. He gently lowered the man to the floor, before standing up straight again.

The trooper would be fine, but he applied some biofoam to the cuts anyway – in a biological research facility, he didn't want them to get infected with whatever the enemy had cooking here. It also numbed the pain of his bruised face, and stopped him from moaning, distracting the corpsman from more important duties – like checking the two wounded troopers now trapped under rubble.

Jeremy braced one shoulder against the pile of rubble, lifting it with his hands. A pair of troopers ducked under, dragging the men out.

The Spartan let his burden drop – there was almost a second explosion, as dust and polycrete filled the air again.

"Sergeant! Take a headcount! Jeremy, get to those doors – if this is a distraction, I want a tonne of Spartan meeting the damn Innies."

Jeremy nodded, hefting his machinegun, and jogged off. An ODST Fireteam peeled off to follow him, waved after the Spartan by Sergeant Wallace, who was jogging through the dust towards Andrew.

"Anyone hurt?"

Wallace shook his head. "Nothing over the COMs, but a few haven't checked in."

Great. So either unconscious or dead – still out of the game right now. If the rebels hit now, Andrew wondered if the ODSTs could fend off the counterassault, even while shaken and still coughing from the dust that filled the air.

Well, the best defence was a good offence.

"Change of plan, Sergeant. We're going in now."

The man nodded, snapping off order rapid-fire to his men. Andrew pulled his assault rifle, flicking the safety off and chambering a round in one fluid motion, and moved over to Laura, who was now crouched low, fibre optic wire running from her datapad to the computer output before her.

"Rebel movement?"

She signed back, _negative._

Odd. If it _was_ caused by the Insurrectionists below them, then he doubted the enemy would give them a chance to regroup. He'd expected to be coming under fire now – instead, the staircases were just as empty, the elevator just as non-functional.

_Maybe they don't even know we're here?_ Laura asked, hands dancing through the air. _They have no access to the security systems from down there._

He shook his head. "They're barricading against _something_, and if it's not us, then what?"

She shrugged, returning to her work wordlessly. As always.

"Keep at it. Try to salvage a screen, link up to the cameras again. I want eyes-on their every move, even if it isn't in our direction."

He moved over to the doorway as Jeremy kicked the door down with one armoured boot, stepping through, sweeping the machinegun across the corridor within. ODSTs followed, rifles and submachine guns raised, moving slowly behind Jeremy, using him as a shield – with a tonne of MJOLNIR, plus energy shields, it was a smart move for the troopers.

Andrew nodded to Wallace. "Have you got a full headcount?"

The man grimaced. "Yeah. Three missing, another crushed by debris. Two more unconscious, but battle-ready once they wake up."

Andrew felt something drop in his stomach. As if he needed further reinforcement that something wasn't right.

"You think this was rebel, sir?" the man asked. Not concerned, not afraid, far calmer than most "regular" humans that Andrew had met would have been.

He shook his head. "If it was, then it wasn't very well planned – half a dozen troopers down, and no attack? Not their style."

Wallace nodded. "Then it was incidental. Whatever we copped is the fallout from something bigger." He paused. "If they're desperate, maybe they're pulling a kamikaze?"

Andrew smiled beneath his helmet. "Don't sound so hopeful," he said, wryly.

Wallace shrugged. "Hey, bullets are expensive these days. If the Innies want to put themselves out of our misery, that's fine by me."

Laura's status light flickered, and Andrew silently opened the attached text file: _uplink established. Transmitting images._

"We've got eyes-on, Sergeant."

The sight that met him was…confusing. Most of the cameras had been damaged, and the images were, as a result, fuzzy or incoherent, or nonexistent. The ones that worked showed the classic signs of an explosion – the walls and ceiling were scorched, and most of the barricades had been toppled by the blast. A few rebels were still moving, but weakly, most of them injured – and a lot of dead, those caught right in the blast.

"Whatever happened, they just softened themselves up." He nodded to Jeremy – he and the trooper Fireteam had taken positions at the top of the stairwell at the end of the corridor. They charged down them, weapons at the ready, Jeremy taking the lead. Andrew and Wallace followed after them.

The door at the bottom was not what he had expected. It was solid steel, and from the looks of it had been welded shut. Whoever was in here wanted to _stay_ in there, or keep _something_ in there at any rate.

They hadn't reckoned on a Spartan. Jeremy smashed a foot into the door, the steel crunching inward. Andrew lowered his shoulder and charged – the door buckled at its hinges, bending inward, and another powerful kick from Jeremy sent it flying inward.

Andrew raised his rifle, Jeremy his machinegun, and the troopers moved forward, shouting at the occupants-

-who, as one, raised their hands in surrender.

* * *

"This is out of order, sir."

Commander Landers snorted in derision. "No, really?" he shot back, sarcasm dripping heavily. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

Lieutenant Commander Indara frowned, plainly offended, but Landers could care less about offending his executive officer right now. She could get over it.

"Commander Fenworth has authority, Sarah. Our hands are tied."

Indara sighed in frustration. He shared the feeling – he didn't like being treated like a passenger aboard his own ship any more than she did. But the damned Spook had authority for the duration of the mission.

"What the hell is going on, sir?" she muttered, a little resentfully, but not at him.

He sighed. "Not what we were debriefed on, Lieutenant Commander, that's for sure."

As far as he had been told, this should have been a routine investigation. Arrive in the system, launch a ground team, wait until the facility was secured and then send the dropships back in to pick up the Helljumpers and any prisoners. And then had come the business of the mysterious dead Battlegroup, and now an explosion on the moon's surface – nothing was going as he had been told.

Not to mention that, apparently, there was some kind of biological threat aboard the corvettes that needed to be dealt with.

When the agent had told him, he'd gone ballistic. Fenworth had sent a valuable operative aboard a ship with no intelligence, and now she'd just told him that they had to spent valuable hours manoeuvring so that they could extract her – then she'd callously dismissed his concerns about infection with some bullshit about vacuum sterilisation – he was a naval officer, not a civilian, and he knew full well that biological contaminants like that weren't so easily killed.

But she had authority. Until she placed his ship in danger. Which, he had to admit, she had not.

The asteroids were still many hours away, long enough to move to a safe distance. And after Agent VECTOR was back aboard, he'd be isolating her in the ship's quarantine facilities until the chief medical officer could verify no risk of contagion – and then it would be his pleasure to put an Archer missile into each of the "infected" ships. It would be nice to smash something to pieces – almost like real combat.

He sighed, rubbing his eyes wearily. He was tired – tired of ONI Spooks and whatever the hell kind of mission they'd cooked up for him, his men, and the ODSTs and Spartans on the ground. What the hell was so important it was worth risking elite Helljumpers, Spartan supersoldiers, and one of the few Prowlers still left to the UNSC?

Well, Fenworth wasn't exactly going to tell him, was she?

He felt the urge to just ignore the chain of command, and order his Marines to throw her in the brig. Call back the surface teams, nuke the moon from orbit, and then blow the corvettes now. Sorry about VECTOR, but fortunes of war and all that. And then he thought about the court martial he would face.

Frustration. Nothing he could do, without pissing ONI off.

God DAMN it.

* * *

VECTOR could feel the heat. Not physically – the thermally regulated EVA suit protected her from lethal temperatures, though this was nowhere lethal. Just uncomfortable. But she could _feel_ the waves of heat rolling outward from deeper in the ship, right in the heart of engineering.

If she had thought about it before barrelling her way in, she might have reflected that something that doesn't show up on thermal sensors might prefer a warmer environment – and engineering was as warm on a ship as you could get.

A lot of people think space is cold, and maybe it is in the vacuum. But aboard a ship, it was _heat_ that concerned engineers and technicians – with no atmosphere around them, it couldn't efficiently radiate on its own. Radiator panels helped discharge the excess heat, and some of it got recycles as additional power, and heat sinks could be used to temporarily store this heat during stealth missions – like the _Hunters Arrow – _but using them for prolonged periods risked burning the crew alive.

Right now, she wondered just what the tolerance for the creatures she was ploughing her way through was. Just what could they endure? She hoped she didn't find out.

She came to a corner, slowing her drift by applying pressure to a handhold, coming to a stop. She peered around the corner, flashlight turned off, eyes peering into the gloom – clear.

She rounded the corner.

She'd signed up, all those years ago, to put bullets into aliens. When she'd proven exceptionally good at that, serving in a Naval Special Warfare unit for a few years, she'd been offered the chance to participate in TROJAN – her bones had been reinforced, her muscles re-knitted for higher density and efficiency, her reaction times heightened and her mental faculties improved, and her eyesight augmented. Still, she was no Spartan – the MJOLNIR armour that was their trademark was still too much for a TROJAN to handle. But she was good, and she knew it.

Good enough to face down three of the aliens?

She wondered how she'd missed them at first, but then realised that she hadn't – the corridors were now totally covered in the resin-like covering that these aliens secreted, almost like a hive – it was black, it didn't show up on thermals, and it was bony and knobbly – they'd just been attached to the walls, waiting, blending right in.

Damn they were good.

They turned in unison, eyeless heads focussed intently on her. She could feel something radiating from them – not fear, or anger, but intense, unrelenting hate. As if her mere existence was an insult, one they intended to repay in kind.

Well, she had plenty of insults she could hurl at them, all of them 7.62mm full-metal jacket.

One of the creatures kicked off against the knobbly wall, maw gaping and claws out. The other two gripped the rugged surfaces, crawling along swiftly. Calypso pumped off a burst of assault rifle fire, using the momentum to propel her back at an equally fast rate. The leading creature caught a glancing blow, shrieked in agony, but kept on coming. Acid splashed against the walls, one of its comrades not ducking out of the way fast enough – it screamed as acid dissolved through it.

The other two, one wounded and the other untouched, barrelled on past the scene of alien carnage.

Calypso put out a hand, grabbing a corner, swinging herself around sharply and hugging the wall as the lead alien bounced off the wall, scrabbling in mid-air. She fired her shotgun, buckshot shattering the thing's exoskeleton, and splattering acid across the bulkhead – the corpse bounced against the wall, still writhing, but probably still dead.

She fired another burst from her rifle, but the third creature was smarter. She heard it, scrabbling around – and saw an alien sail past her field of fire. She fired instinctively, keeping her grip on the wall to stop her tumbling back – and was surprised as the second alien leapt, using the corpses as cover, bounced off the opposite bulkhead, and lunged.

She lashed out instinctively, smacking the creature on its elongated domed head, knocking it aside. It still slammed right into her, smacking her rifle into the darkness somewhere, but some of its momentum and composure was gone – she felt talons tearing her vacuum suit, and she grabbed its arms, holding it out away from her. The thing was big, and strong, but she wasn't a pushover herself, and now she could feel the thing bellowing – her visor fogged up as its breath condensed on it, and she could see inside its jaws as she struggled with the thing – a tongue writhed around in there, somewhere, which-

-snapped out, springing out and snapping _another_ pair of jaws close to her face.

These things could go to hell. But they'd be perfectly at home there, she supposed.

She brought her knees up, braced her feet against the thing's chest suppressing a shudder of revulsion, and kicked off, sending them both tumbling. The alien creature screamed some more and thrashed around, clawing for a handhold.

Calypso, on the other hand, pulled one of her pistols, aimed as she tumbled, and fired.

She waited as the added momentum brought her up to the wall, reached out for a handhold, and steadied herself. Pistol still aimed at the thing, she could see that she'd hit it – a glancing blow, but acid "blood" was leaking out, bubbling away against the bulkhead. And it looked mad.

She fired the rest of the magazine, bullets crunching into the black exoskeleton of the creature and embedding into the bulkhead behind it. She couldn't hear its screams, but she could see them, and she thought she could feel them – vibrations in the air. Whatever the case, it raised the hair on the back of the neck.

It floundered around for a while, head turned to look at her, but slowed down as green "blood" continued to bubble out from its bullet-riddled body. It was twitching by the time it hit the bulkhead, and when it bounced it had gone limp.

She activated the COM. "ORACLE, problem – I've got three burning corpses blocking the way."

"_One moment, VECTOR. Something's happened."_

She waited, adrenaline still pumping, pistol sweeping the corridor. She found her rifle, now bent in half – she stripped and dismantled it absent-mindedly, standard practice for disabled UNSC weaponry in the face of Covenant attempts to gain any intelligence on humanity, and idly wondered if the creatures knew how to use a human forearm. She checked her suit – if there were any punctures, then her plan was totally pointless. Integrity was intact – the vacuum-proof material had held, thankfully. Impatiently, she activated the COM again.

"I say again, I've got bubbling alien debris blocking the route." She'd already mapped out an alternate route, but she'd rather have ORACLE's eyes on, to warn her.

"_Sorry VECTOR. New route appears clear on motion trackers, nothing on thermals or optics."_

Curious, she asked, "so what's happening over there?"

"_Activity at the ground site. Not what we expected."_

"Okay. Well, when you can tell Indigo to watch their backs. If these things got onto the Battlegroup, then there must be more down there."

"_Copy that, VECTOR. Good luck."_


	3. Calm Before the Storm

_Halo is a copyrighted franchise of Microsoft Corporation and 343 Industries and "Alien" is a copyrighted franchise of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. No claim of ownership over any characters, places, events or items that are not original is asserted. Many thanks to my fellow members of for being just generally awesome, especially Matt-256 for lending me the character of Helen Calypso, and Ahalosniper for the wonderfully devious Puppet Master. And, as they say, read and review!_

**1914 HOURS, 27****th**** SEPTEMBER, 2557 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / "RAPTORS NEST" SITE, UNKNOWN STAR SYSTEM**

Wallace gingerly stepped over the door lying across the threshold, submachine gun nestled in the crook of his arm. He'd expected the slab of metal to be blown right across the room – C12 was a powerful explosive, originally developed for colonial mining – combustible in most environments, regardless of gravity conditions or atmosphere composition, if there even was an atmosphere. It was one of the UNSC military's smarter moves to adopt it, replacing the older shaped charges – a thimble-full on each hinge, another on the locking mechanism, had blown three holes in a solid steel/titanium plate.

The fact that all it had done was topple backwards almost lazily probably meant that it wasn't _just_ steel or titanium. He made a mental note to ask one of the engineers in the platoon. In the meantime, he surveyed the room beyond.

Lockers lined the room. A few of their doors had been left ajar, and Wallace gathered that they had just attacked the rebel armoury, or at least one of them based on standard enemy practice. Black-market weapons and ammunition were stacked in rows within – an odd assortment of private-sector issue MA2 and MA3 rifles were supplemented by the occasional MA5, various types of submachine gun and pistol, mostly modified variants of the M6, together with half a dozen types of shotgun. A few of his men were already rummaging through them, sorting out the equipment that was usable and what they could afford to set aside – most ODST weaponry was designed to accept most types of ammunition magazine, because special forces in enemy territory couldn't afford to be picky. A small pile had already been stacked up, where rifles, machineguns, shotguns and ammunition crates were being stacked.

Private Yelnats, head still bloody from the explosion but looking determined, opened a locker and pulled out a crate marked "grenades." He nodded pointedly at the man, who shrugged and carefully reached for a prybar. Meanwhile, the big Spartan, Jeremy, was consulting with a pair of Wallace's men, PFCs Murkowski and Ver Straten, on the corridor at the end of the armoury leading to the stairwell/elevator hub.

The rest of his men, meanwhile, were policing the prisoners.

Wallace wasn't green – he'd enlisted back in '27, serving as a Marine during some of the campaigns to put down the Insurrection, so humanity could focus on defending itself from the Covenant. As such, he'd learnt a lot in his time fighting rebel troops – no two organisations were ever the same. Some were small confederations of terrorist cells, connected only tenuously so that it could be cut easily. Others were full paramilitary forces, well funded by front companies and equipped and trained like a proper military. Some were genuine reformers who asked only for colonial autonomy rather than outright independence, while others were zealots, political or religious, who would settle with nothing less than the acceptance of their own ideals and principles over any other.

In the eight years Wallace had fought the dying Insurrection, he had learnt that rebels _never_ surrendered, and when they did it was because they were confident that it would make no difference to their plans – that they had bombs set somewhere, or strapped to themselves, or that their friends and compatriots had plans already under way. Something, therefore, was wrong with the picture in front of him.

The Helljumpers had stormed the room, tossing a smoke grenade ahead of them, using thermal imaging for an unimpaired view. They had expected to enter, catch the enemy confused and surprised, and neutralise the threat they presented. Everything had gone according to that plan, right up until the enemy refused to engage them and, still coughing, raised their arms and started to kneel. He'd seen a few of their faces as the smoke started to clear – there was confusion and surprise, yes, but most of them looked _relieved_, an expression that Wallace had never seen in his time wearing a Helljumper Battle-Dress Uniform.

And then, when he had taken a look at their defensive arrangements, he had discovered another surprise. All the cover in the room, overturned tables, desks, and empty crates, was arranged to provide ideal cover for the defenders – but facing the wrong way. It made their position a bad one for catching invaders – in fact, it looked more like they were meant to catch something coming the other way, to stop someone from getting out.

He'd commented on this fact to Andrew-306. He'd nodded, and then asked him to supervise the consolidation of the room and its occupants while he and Laura headed back out to the atrium.

Vasquez's and Nelson's Fire teams had already disarmed the prisoners, and their hands were looped in memory cable, conforming to the desired shape and then hardening. They were then marched to a corner of the room where they would be processed – names and details recorded for analysis by ONI later, cross-referencing them against known Persons of Interest. The rest of the platoon were righting dislodged cover, restoring it so that they could make use of it if need be.

He nodded slightly to Vasquez, who muttered something to one of her men and then strode to join him.

"How's the roundup?"

She shrugged. "They're cooperating, sir. Names, details – we're even getting names of loved ones and requests to inform them of their survival."

"Oh yeah, ONI's always been really big on transparency," he said sarcastically. "Anything useful?"

"We haven't begun interrogating any of them yet, but they don't feel like rebels. No zeal."

He knew what she meant. Even taken prisoner after weeks of holding out against artillery and mortar shelling, rebel prisoners usually complied only unwillingly, mixing information with taunts, bluffs, useless threats and allegations of improper relations with one's parents. A broken finger usually shut them up. That wasn't necessary here, though.

"No. They don't, do they? It's such a shame the cloud cover cuts us off from the Prowler, or I'd radio for clarification."

Vasquez caught the tone of his voice – he was as suspicious of the prisoners as she was, and was damn sure ONI knew more than they had been told. But, Wallace mused, that wasn't anything new – there were good reasons why they were called _spooks_.

"Yes sir," she said, matching his tone. "And I'm sure they would respond with all appropriate speed and accuracy."

He shook his head. "What's Yelnats found?"

She glanced at the private, carefully laying grenades out by type. "There's conventional fragmentation grenades, a few flash-bangs and smokes. And then there are the _special_ ones – some kind of nerve toxin, not one I've ever seen. VX17? Heard of it?"

He frowned. "That was in trials, back in '42. As far as I know, we scrapped it because Grunts were immune, and they were too expensive to be worth using on less common targets."

"So they have access to decommissioned materials?"

He smiled wryly. "Let's hope they haven't got any VAJRA suits stored away. The only powered armour I'm comfortable around is seven feet tall, green, and currently being worn by our Spartan friends."

"I don't know about that, sir. The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

"As long as it's not on top of me," he retorted. "Any luck on the mapping hardware?"

Standard equipment for any urban or tight-quarters operations were sophisticated, expensive, and sensitive RADAR mapping gear that constructed a three-dimensional image of a building's interior. Officially, it wasn't in production – it was just codenamed SEER.

She grimaced. "The picture's confusing. We're fine for the top three floors, but below that it registers as null – less than nothing. One of the Spartans is working on it now."

That would be Laura, as Wallace recalled. She was their technician, wasn't she?

It occurred to Wallace that few men or women were on a first-name basis with Spartan supersoldiers, much less Helljumpers. He'd been…well, maybe lucky wasn't the right word, but he'd fought alongside a few supersoldiers in his time, not all of them Spartans, but alongside Indigo three times – the evacuation of Delta Pavonis in '49, the year-long Minorca campaign, and then the Ares debacle in '52. They'd been through a lot, him and them, but it still unnerved him sometimes that he'd _survived_ that many battles, alongside Spartans. As the saying went; if boots hit dirt, you're gonna get hurt – if green joins you, more fool you. Spartans were last resorts.

Sometimes he felt his luck was going to run out. Every drop seemed one step closer to the day his 'chute failed, that one plasma bolt or bullet found its mark, or his training failed him.

It kept him up some nights. Actually, a _lot_ of nights.

"Don't bother. If it's anything like the outside, it'll be baffled – whatever they stole from ONI R&D. Let's try…another approach."

She cocked her head, equivalent to raising an eyebrow. "Circe again?"

"It worked so well last time."

"We're not in a jungle this time. Or under Covenant attack."

"As far as you know," he said, patting a hand on her shoulder and turning to the prisoners, making a show of clapping his hands together and rubbing them enthusiastically as he approached them. A few of them seemed to guess that whatever he was thinking about wasn't exactly tea and crumpets.

"Who's in charge here?" he barked out.

One of the prisoners raised a tentative hand. "Um…you are?"

"And don't you forget it." A couple of the Helljumpers laughed. It was not a particularly nice laugh.

"Alright, lads," he said congenially to the prisoners. "I've got a special assignment for somebody, and two ways we can do it – one of them is the easy way. I need a volunteer – someone who knows these tunnels back to front, who can draw us a detailed three-dimensional map of this network of tunnels. And no funny ideas – I want notations and highlights. If my men find something that isn't on the map, I'll be asking why. If they don't find something that they should, I'll be asking why. If you want to lead us into a trap, don't bother, because we'll be sending you ahead of us to test the waters, so to speak. Any takers?"

A hand waved in the hand. "Er…what's the other way?"

Wallace grinned. "The _other_ way is _very_ easy – we let you go running off on your own, a grenade tied to your belts, and see how far you get."

There was a panicked flurry of activity, and a nervous young man was rudely shoved out of the circle of sullen prisoners. He turned, swore at his ex-comrades, and then turned back around to face Wallace, who clapped a consoling hand on his shoulder.

"Looks like you've been volunteered, lad. Congratulations."

The man's face fell. He couldn't have looked more stunned if he'd been told his mother had been run over by a Warthog. "Um…well, er, I'll, uh, need a Chatter. Paper's not exactly three-dimensional."

Wallace pushed a handheld Chatter device into his hand. "And don't get any funny ideas. Everything but the mapping gear is deadlocked. _Explosively_. Got it?" The man nodded miserably. "Good man. Now get cracking."

The man nodded in terror.

Vasquez chuckled under her breath. "It worked better on Circe, sir."

"We don't have the immediacy of Grunt suicide squads. At least, not as far as I know." And yet, the threat of just letting them go had worked just as well – as he'd expected. He was sure at least a _few_ would have rather taken their chances out in the corridors – the grenade had been a joke, and he was reasonably sure they'd known that at the time. But those corridors…

"When he's given us a decent map, take your Fireteam on patrol and secure the rest of the floor. There are some subsections that aren't showing up on motion trackers."

* * *

Puppet Master infiltrated. It was what he did. He was very good at it, even if he did say so himself. _Especially_ because he said so. He made a point of being honest – if he could help it.

The systems of the corvettes opened before him like a thin silk veil. Occasionally he simply tore through them. The few defensive systems operation would never have been able to stop him, even at full capacity. Damaged and fragmented and confused, Puppet Master extended him all the sympathy he could spare them – a quick end.

He made his way quickly, bouncing through the network in his search. Data poured through him – most of it useless, sensor readouts, thermal and radiation warnings, archives – he copied them anyway, because even the minor details would be enormously valuable to his employer. He dug deep, uncovering the files that he sought, and discarding everything else.

Almost as an afterthought, he extended the radiator panels. No point wasting VECTOR – the data _she_ was gathering would be invaluable, too.

Nevertheless, he wasn't satisfied. He searched deeper, and harder.

There – a data trail, obscured in exhaust readouts, rerouted through the targeting and navigation systems, leading back to…strange. He followed the trail again, and could clearly see where it diverged and rejoined – but it wasn't the same signal. Subtly but importantly different.

He checked again, and found another divergence – clever. Obscuring the real signal with a fake one. He followed it, shrugging off the defensive programs still online, and-

There. He was through.

It had been harder than he'd expected. If he hadn't been looking for it, he may have missed it altogether. More importantly, even the ship's crew wouldn't have known what they were dealing with. If they'd detected the source of the signal, they would have traced it back to the captain's quarters. This was where Puppet Master found himself now.

He stopped. Surely it couldn't be this easy?

He projected the room holographically – he found it helped to orient himself. Physically, neither he nor the room would exist in physical space. But simulating the physical environment appealed to his former human sensibilities, and it allowed him to pay attention to details that would otherwise have escaped his gaze.

He found himself materializing in a small cabin. Clean, tidy. Decidedly _military_, Puppet Master thought derogatorily. The bed was made, the shelves were stacked with hardcopy manuals and diagrams of naval vessels, and the cupboard door was slightly ajar. He could see the former Captain's dress whites hanging in a vacuum-sealed bag, ready to be donned if need be. A few spare duty uniforms hung in similar bags, looking slightly more used. But only slightly.

The man had been a stickler for neatness. How very _military_.

Puppet Master's avatar examined the room, using eyes that had long ago fallen dark. It was a strange sensation – an AI existed in a purely electronic state as hardware. Some weren't even tied to their own hardware – they could transfer themselves from one to another. Puppet Master, alas, lacked that luxury. If something happened to his core, installed in the UNSC _Hunter's Arrow's_ engine room, he would be literally dead.

Not that he expected anything to happen to it, with an armed guard of Marines kept permanently on-station. Not for his protection, though – for the crew's.

His employers did not trust him. They were quite right not to, of course.

He traced a line in the "air", his robes sliding up along his arm as it followed a line of generated photons – a wireless signal transfer. The avatar itself was of a powerfully-built man in black robes, a seventeenth century hat atop his head, and a smiling, leering mask where his face would have been. Most AI projected avatars automatically – they were part of their core personalities. Some generated "false" avatars, to put the humans they interacted with at ease.

Puppet Master had never really cared what others thought of him – he knew they were too busy trying to figure out what _he_ thought of _them. _He kept his secrets well, and kept them long. Secrets were his game, after all, and he was a good player.

There was a joke in it somewhere. Nobody had yet found it. He looked forward to the day they did.

He followed the simulated line as it connected with an apparently harmless bundle of wires and cables. Puppet Master dropped down to his haunches, gazing at the space from behind his mask, watching impassively the small, almost benign looking rectangle of black metal. If anyone else had seen it, they might have dismissed it as a mini-Chatter that servicemen had found a love for, connecting to their neural interfaces for use.

The captain, though, had seemed far too professional for that. Too rigid, too much a stickler for the rules. Exactly what was an untidy bundle of cables doing in his personal space?

Tentatively, he extended a "finger" – he interfaced with the machine, feeling the handshake protocol occur and…he was in.

"Well, as Alice said: "curiouser and curiouser"."

Such a convoluted route to take for such a simple connection. Somebody was being extremely paranoid – somebody who wanted anyone who found it to suspect that the captain was behind it. But Puppet Master doubted it very much – he had heard the recording of VECTORs encounter with the man, had seen the terror in his eyes, the horror and surprise. If he had any role in what had happened to his battlegroup, he would not have stood for that.

Somebody was going to elaborate lengths to pin something on an innocent man, and Puppet Master didn't even know what they were trying to pin. Yet.

He accessed the box, sifting through the…yes. Ahah! He halted all other intrusive procedures, focusing them – the little box was full of surprises. It had erected a powerful firewall and deployed data scavengers – he was glad he'd scraped what he could together already, and watched as the systems were systematically purged with a speed that astonished him. He could feel the firewall shifting beneath his gaze, constantly changing – too fast for him to analyse it, too fast to discern a pattern. The box itself remained impervious, electronically.

What about physically?

VECTOR was busy, he understood that. But surely some allowances would have to be made?

* * *

The hardware was proving more troublesome for Laura than Andrew had expected, but he was confident. They'd once done war games in a Reach junkyard – Laura had cobbled together an EMP from a car riddled with bullet holes, a perfectly good fridge some New Alexandrian had decided to throw out, and some fizzy drink cans. Charlie Company, the "enemy" for the day, had struggled to explain to their commanders why every vehicle and weapon had suddenly failed, allowing John-117 to lead the trainees to an easy victory. Doctor Halsey had commended Laura for her ingenuity, asked to be shown one of the devices, and had been impressed. It hadn't stopped Indigo being thrown in the brig for cheating, but the three of them had enjoyed the occasional repayment in the form of food or trinkets for the next week. And then Kelly had beaten the interstellar track-and-field record, and it had been her getting the praise, even from Indigo – fame was not something to be sought or treasured, but it came.

Laura had been famously good at machines. It was like saying fish swam in the ocean. There was _so_ much more to it.

"Any good?"

She didn't sign with her hands, which were still digging beneath the metal housing, instead using the point-to-point uplink to send a text message: _Negative. Internal crystal matrix is fried. Need to replace it._

Damn. There, officially, went their only link to the Prowler.

He'd assessed the atmospheric composition on the way down to the moon – anomalous electromagnetic storms formed a communications barrier, making contact with the _Hunter's Arrow_ impossible. If they had a map of the "currents", they could perhaps work something out with an uplink to the rebel relay station, but that would attract too much attention, take too long, and waste manpower they couldn't afford. Their regular radio communications hardware was nowhere near powerful enough to punch through the interference.

Oh well, he decided. What was the old military saying? Who Dares, Wins.

He booted the _other_ hardware.

"Contact established. Keep working on the crystal matrix, see if you can scavenge anything from the armoury."

_Affirmative._

Andrew's helmet display flickered as Laura left, and another small dialogue box appeared in the corner, a single word appearing: _codeword_

He transmitted _SEMANTICS._

The previous message vanished, replaced with _contact established. Report._

_Alpha secured, two wounded. Bravo and Charlie abandoned. Thirteen prisoners taken. Request updated orbital situation._

_Request denied. Situation volatile._ He frowned, concerned. It was just supposed to be a routine boarding of a dead ship. Which meant that it had become far from routine, or that the ship was not as dead as they'd hoped.

_Request VECTOR status._

He sighed slightly in relief as the word_ Active_ appeared. It was followed by, _Do they suspect?_

_Hard not to,_ he responded._ Situation anomalous. Sergeant is intelligent. Expect cover blown within next few hours._

_Copy. Proceed with Phase Two. Maintain cover until absolutely necessary. Confirm._

He _confirmed_, followed by, _Request prisoner pickup._

_Denied. Secure prisoners until mission accomplished._

Reluctantly, he typed, _Affirmative. Over._

The dialogue box closed.

He opened the TEAMCOM. "Phase Two approved."

* * *

Calypso pushed herself along the weightless hallway, one hand on the drift rail overhead, the other carrying her assault rifle. She had both flashlights on – one attached to her helmet, tracking the movement of her head, and the other mounted under the barrel of the weapon. It always paid to plan for everything, and the aliens didn't seem to like light very much. It didn't stop them, but even minor distractions were a help.

She followed the map inside her head, noting that she would soon be entering the personnel quarters for the crew. Most of the crew would have been on duty when the boarders had attacked, but she'd checked the logs. The captain hadn't had time to declare combat alert alpha, enact the Cole Protocol, or perform the myriad of other duties that would have been urgent. He'd purged the navigation core after he'd been…implanted, but the rest of the crew had probably gotten little or no warning.

The armoury had been fully stocked. They hadn't had time to arm and armour themselves. What could they have done against the…things?

She'd seen a lot in her time as a TROJAN operative. As one of the few non-Spartan supersoldier projects that hadn't been an abject failure, she'd been deployed against pretty much everything – turncoat UNSC colonels and generals, rebel terrorist groups, even a few genocidal religious cultists. And a _lot_ of action against the Covenant. But in all those years, she'd never seen anything that scared her like this. The Covenant may be alien, but they didn't feel alien. They had language, culture, logic, even if they had been the enemy. But these aliens were like nothing she'd ever seen – they had minds, yes, and good ones, but too full of rage and hate. They were evil incarnate.

She also hadn't considered herself a religious person before, either. She hoped she was right, because any god that created something like them was not a benevolent and loving one.

"_VECTOR? I'm afraid there's been a change of plan."_

Odd. A male voice, definitely not ORACLE. Familiar. "Identify yourself or clear the COM channel."

"_My dear girl, I'm insulted. I didn't think I would fade from your memory so quickly."_

Impossible. God damn it. Not him – _anybody_ but him.

"Puppet Master?"

"_The one and only."_

Great. And she'd thought things couldn't get any worse.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she muttered in disgust. "How did you-"

"_Helen, please,"_ the voice said in mock exasperation. _"I have authorization – SHOGUN himself cleared my inclusion on this mission. I was to be activated in the event of unusual or unanticipated…complications. A very near certainty on missions like this, wouldn't you say?"_

She couldn't disagree. It was, after all, why she and the Spartans had been included as well.

Puppet Master was an AI. That was really the extent of her knowledge of him – everything else about him was myth, rumour, or classified at the highest levels. Last she'd heard about him, he'd been working for the ONI agents on Mamore before Reach fell, and then he'd disappeared. Evidently he'd resurfaced again, and made a deal with her current boss – Codename: SHOGUN, the man in charge of this and other investigations like this, a massive project called Operation: VORAUSSICHT.

Exactly why he'd agreed to take the AI on remained a mystery – her own sources claimed he'd been involved in more than a dozen illegal projects, some of which they had investigated. Treason, war crimes, genocide – some of the worst crimes humans could do to each other. There was a war still on against the Brutes, filling headlines and distracting the media, but ONI was still keeping VORAUSSICHT tightly to its chest. The kinds of things they dealt with would damage the UNSC, and perhaps even shatter it – most of the stuff they put a stop to was former-ONI.

Knowing that, she couldn't blame Captain Landers for not trusting her or ORACLE. But the fact that they'd brought an AI like Puppet Master along made even Calypso uneasy.

"What do you want?" she hissed. "I'm a little busy at the moment."

"_Don't worry. This won't take long – a few minutes at maximum. In fact, you're very close to it. All I require is for you to retrieve an item for me from the captain's quarters. It is small, durable, and unlikely to explode at all, so I see no reason for you to worry about it."_

"Does ORACLE know about this?"

"_No. You can inform her if you'd like, but it's hardly a secret – I simply lack the resources to access it remotely. Once you bring it back aboard the ship, I can analyse it more thoroughly"_

She glanced at a sign on a nearby bulkhead. "I'm near the officers' mess now. Diverting for retrieval."

She didn't like this. If Puppet Master was anywhere close, then he had means of his own to access things remotely. If he needed a hard copy, then it meant that something was very wrong – especially because this was Puppet Master who was having trouble doing the accessing.

At least it wasn't a very long detour. She needed to pass through the mess hall anyway to get to engineering, and that connected to the crew quarters. Ideally, it would take perhaps a few minutes at most.

Almost inadvertently, she reflected that part of the crew would have been off duty when the aliens attacked, and wouldn't have had time to move very far before being overwhelmed. And if what she had seen already was anything to go by, it wouldn't be a pretty sight. She'd seen hundreds of dead bodies , human and Covenant, before in varying states of destruction, and it would have been nice to say she was used to it. But in all honesty, every corpse she found horrified her.

She kept drifting through the blackened corridors, the strange black shell covering the bulkheads, floors and ceilings becoming thicker, more thorough in their spread – the aliens had obviously done a better job here. Which meant that they would have passed through this section of the ship. With any luck, they had already moved on by now, perhaps to hunt her down elsewhere.

The bastards were smart. Would they expect an attack within the nexus of their parts of the ship? No way to tell, no reason to think otherwise. Hope was all that remained, and not much of it at that.

* * *

Vasquez held the rifle up to eye-level, butt resting against her shoulder. It wasn't really necessary for accuracy – the electronics suite attached to the barrel included an uplink to her neural retina display indicating exactly where her bullets would go, even when fired akimbo, but she preferred the posture anyway. Equipment malfunctioned – the body, except in some very unfortunate circumstances, did not. The flashlight slung under the barrel, standard issue on an MA5C assault rifle, illuminated the darkened hallway – something had happened to the lights, probably knocked out by the explosion.

The rest of her Fireteam fanned out through the darkened corridor, edging forward slowly as they searched for booby traps, corpses, bullet casings, or other signs of what had happened here.

The Innie prisoners had been surprisingly helpful, though reticent. The map they had provided was a detailed one, though incomplete – some tunnels just faded away, because the drawer hadn't known where they went. Others ended at bulkheads they weren't allowed through, and some corridors were just hinted at based on fleeting glimpses. They'd drawn on their collective knowledge, so although it was a patchwork, it was more than double what one man alone had been able to remember.

She had to wonder just _why_ they were so helpful.

She hated Innies. Most people in the military these days did – there had been sympathisers long ago, but not after six years of stubborn insistence by political fanatics that the Covenant were just UNSC propaganda, excused for supposed atrocities. There had still been diehard Covenant Deniers all the way up to '36, when the last of the Outer Colonies had fallen, and the first of the Inner Colonies found its skies filled with alien fighters, its cities swarming with alien troops, and its people dying to alien weapons.

The Insurrection lost all credibility. It collapsed overnight. There were still the terror cells and paramilitary forces, hoping to set up some kind of independence while naively believing the Covenant would pass them by. But they were like the…what had they been called? Survivalists? She'd read about them in the history books – back before the War for Unification of North America, there had been scattered holdouts of people who kept themselves supplied with guns, ammunition, and food enough to last through a long war on their own. People who just wanted to be left alone, and "discouraged" anyone who wanted to meddle in their lives. Most of them really did want to just be left alone, and were content with that lifestyle – but then you got the cults, based around charismatic men who declared themselves the Messiah, declared the rest of the world was already burning in hell, and took fifteen underage wives. Or the _others_, who _wanted_ the world to burn, and who didn't care that it had done nothing to them.

The Insurrection had collapsed, but there were still survivors, scattered by the wartime diaspora. And after the war, the UNSC had found itself riddled with them as they all come crawling back out of the woodwork.

As far as Vasquez knew, the majority of them had become pragmatists – they had seen with their own eyes that aliens were real, and that they were more than capable of turning a lush world into a ball of molten glass. They preferred to act through the system – instead of declaring a jihad on the UNSC, they reformed, becoming political parties. And, to the surprise of almost everyone, it was working – the UNSC was stretched too thin to police everyone, and was still fighting to secure its borders. Colonial autonomy freed them up to fight the real fight. And, at the same time, the colonies realised more so than ever before that they really did need the UNSC to protect them – someday, who knew when, the various factions claiming the legitimacy of the old Covenant would scrape together something resembling unity, and decide that they were strong enough to restart their old holy war. And when they did, the UNSC would be the only barrier between the colonies and almost certain death.

And the UNSC had moved on, as well. Technologically, they were almost on par with the old Covenant – there was new tech being introduced all the time, improvements made to old gear, and revolutionary things being tested. UNSC warships had shields now, except Prowlers – ONI still couldn't figure out how to accommodate an energy shield and stealth – and the capabilities of their weapons were decades ahead of the models used five years ago. On the ground, combat units were finding their arsenals stocked with deployable shields, and even a few personal shields. The UNSC, in their struggle to simply keep up with the Covenant, had shot far ahead of anything the Insurrection could field – the scattered rebels simply couldn't keep up in this arms race.

But that didn't mean people liked relying on the UNSC. And as logical, as sensible, as cooperation was, there were always the ones who wanted to watch the worlds burn. If they couldn't rule, then nobody would.

The "New" Insurrection, as it was being unofficially called by the news outlets, had learned a lot in their time underground. They'd learned the art of infiltration, and they'd learned that if they ever hoped to take the UNSC on in a fight, they'd need technological parity – which meant stealing prototype technology, reverse-engineering it themselves, and equipping their own forces with them.

Things had gotten bad, especially on Mamore. Terrorist strikes were not using plasma charges, ducking behind shields, using military viruses to infiltrate systems, decrypt transmissions, and cause confusion. And they were using the UNSC's own technology against them.

And ONI, at last, had decided to do something about that.

She was vague about the whole thing – she wasn't technically a _part_ of Operation VORAUSSICHT, their unit just happened to work for them occasionally. The Colonel was an old friend to the investigation lead, a shadowy figure codenamed SHOGUN. But, although any information about their actions was strictly classified TOP SECRET / NOVEMBER BLACK – making it a capital offense to look through their files – there were always rumours among Marines and Soldiers: whispers of what had happened on Matariki; mutterings about apartment blocks being evacuated; orbital strikes on supposed country ranches.

The sum of them was, to Vasquez, disquieting – infiltration of classified projects and operations.

To ONI, it could be catastrophic – and not only from a technological stand.

Everyone knew ONI had its secrets, tightly locked away in its metaphorical vaults. But if Insurrectionists were infiltrating the development projects, what was stopping them from discovering all the Office of Naval Intelligence's secrets, and using them against them? Finding former agents with a grudge? Finding the details of projects long abandoned? Finding information that was being suppressed by ONI – such as, for example, the fact that the UNSC had intentionally deceived the public regarding their ability to defend them from the Covenant to prevent mass panic.? It would mean an almost overnight collapse of not only ONI, but the UNSC, and maybe even the secession of colonies again – and at a time like this, a New Insurrection was the last thing ONI wanted.

And so, VORAUSSICHT had been formed. And that was why a Prowler had been dispatched, carrying three Spartan supersoldiers, a TROJAN-grade agent, and a platoon of the Corps' most experienced Helljumpers to a black rock orbiting a distant star in a system nobody had ever heard of.

Vasquez didn't like it. But she didn't have to.

Her boot kicked against something solid that refused to budge, and she held up a clenched hand, her team obediently stopping. Her VISR system lit up the darkness, highlighting edges, and she could see what it was. She backed away carefully.

The disembodied human arm simply lay there.

She scoured the rest of the corridor, but other than the murky gloom the walls were smooth and rectangular. No ventilation shafts, no doors, no points of entry other than the way they were going.

She waved her team forward as she knelt, examining the arm.

Male, judging by the bulk of it, and the amount of hair – although some of her colleagues sometimes joked that there was less of a difference in the military. The hands were calloused and firm, workers hands. And the arm had been severed at the shoulder, the upper arm's biceps standing out.

Well, "severed" might be the wrong word. A better word might be "torn", or "ripped".

An even better word might be "slashed."

She rolled it over with the rifle muzzle, noting its condition – a bit of bruising, but no blood. Whatever had happened, happened fast, too fast for the victim to even bleed. Rigour mortis had set in, so it had happened a while ago. A tiny part of her rebelled at the thought of examining a disembodied human foot, but she quashed it – it was hardly the first time she'd had to look at human remains, and it was hardly the most malformed.

There was a clatter in the dark. Her rifle snapped up, illuminating only the boot of one of her men, nudging aside a spent bullet casing.

More clattering. She ordered her hand to hold positions again, and widened the beam of her torch.

The floor glittered, a carpet of copper shell casings reflecting the light. On and on into the murk, and even a few twinkles from the darkness further ahead as well.

Something had happened here. Something major.

She held her hand to her helmet, about to radio to Wallace.

And then she heard the scream.

* * *

It felt almost reassuring to be drifting through human quarters again. The alien creatures hadn't expanded their hive in this direction just yet, and the walls were solid steel/titanium/vanadium. She winced as she passed a few bodies, or at least _parts_ of bodies. She tried not to look for the name badges on the uniforms, and she resisted the urge to take any more dogtags – they'd downloaded the ship logs. The crew would all be listed as Missing in Action, and on another, more secret list, as Killed in Action.

Still, she was glad to get out of the…hive, or whatever it was the creatures were making for themselves. She tried not to remember that she'd have to go back into it after this little job was done.

This had once been personnel quarters – vertical bunks lined the walls where the crew would have slept, hidden compartments allowing them a few personal materials – she batted a small metal rectangle out of her way, and felt a twinge of regret as she saw it was a holo-still – a kid and a woman. Was the woman in the picture part of the crew? A loved one? One of billions killed during the war? She'd never know. She wished she could just ignore it, her training told her it was irrelevant, but she also knew that it was _important_ to take note of all these details as she made her way to the captains quarters.

Being a supersoldier was easy – kill everything that needs killing, do your job well, and remain impartial, unattached, unaffected. It conflicted with being a human, though, and she clung to her humanity much tighter.

Maybe it was her humanity that made her scream as she heard the voice.

_The beast jerked its head, searching._

"Good day, VECTOR."

"_JESUS CHRIST PUPPET MASTER, DON'T DO THAT."_

It hadn't come in over the COM system, or at least it hadn't sounded like it. It had come from inside the room somewhere. And then, as she watched, a figure flickered and faded in and out of focus before resolving into a tall figure clad in a black coat, hearing a stovepipe hat, a rapier at the hip and a pale, smiling, vaguely unsettling mask.

Puppet Master bowed. "We meet again on the field of battle, Miss Calypso. I trust you are well?"

"Give me some fucking warning first," she snarled. "I almost shot the place to shreds!"

The figure bowed its head penitently. "It was good fortune, then, that you stayed your hand."

"Where the hell is it?" she demanded.

"By your feet. It's small, innocuous, designed to blend in – you should therefore have no trouble finding it."

She ignored the sarcasm, and tapped her thrusters, bringing her closer to the metal floor. Sometimes she envied civilians – she'd once travelled on a yacht where the entire thing was carpeted in shag. The owner had run up a huge bill on ventilation maintenance as dust particles clogged the filters, but she feeling of it between the toes – compared to cold, bracing metal, it had been worth it.

_Where had it come from? The creature drifts out of the hive, entering parts where the workers have not consolidated, where the hive has not expanded to yet. It sniffs – its sense of smell is good anyway, but in the sterile filtered air, even with the mustiness of inactivity, the scent stands out – a suit had passed this way, faint traces of explosive and smoke trailing behind it. It doesn't think these thoughts in words, of course – its thought have no coherent language a human mind could ever hope to understand. It doesn't know what an M6 pistol is, or the chemical composition of the propellant. But it smells them anyway._

_It follows._

She found the device at last, a small lump of metal with a single diode blinking dark red. She pried it up from its nook, and tucked it into one of her pockets. She glares at the holographic form of Puppet Master.

"This is a bit showy, even for you."

He twirled the cape, and bowed again. "I thought you might enjoy some company. Talking to VECTOR alone must get…tiring."

"Not really," she admitted. "She's barely on anymore."

"A curious coincidence, then, that the, ahah, interruption coincided with the loss of power to the communications relay."

She rolled her eyes. He wouldn't lie about something like that. "Great. So I'm cut off?"

"It appears we both are. I severed part of my core in my investigation of this ship – I had to bounce myself off half a dozen systems just to get in. I'm half the man I once was, you might say."

"Big deal," she retorted, zipping the pocket. "You can just reload from a previous saved state."

He cocked his holographic head. "Oh, really? Do you know what that entails?"

She pulled her pistol again, and wearily muttered, "I have a feeling you're about to tell me."

"I could do so, of course. But I won't. To do so, I need to overwrite my core, replacing it with the old code, adopting the newer memories – in essence, I would be killing myself, and replacing myself with a newer version of me. You would notice no difference, but it would mean an end for a version of myself."

"Doesn't seem like much of a loss," she said.

"To you, perhaps. Replace my memories, replace my components, but don't take away my soul."

"So what? You want me to repair the relay now? I'm meant to be blowing it up, not repairing it."

"That won't be necessary," he said, in a tone that matched the wide grin of the mask. "There is a relatively efficient and simple way to reunify this splinter of myself with the central core."

"Oh good."

"I hitch a ride with you."

_Is that sound? The beast stretches out a hand to the wall, dragging a claw to stop its rotation and slow its speed. Yes. A voice. Something alive. Something _still_ alive in their territory. Such a thing intolerable – all perished before the might of the swarm, or served to feed its brood! It bared its teeth, and braced its legs, muscles coiling like springs…_

"No." Emphatically.

"Why not?"

"Because I can't afford to tow you around too. I'm on a deadline!"

"I currently take up four exabytes. Your suit's capacity is six. It was designed for compatability with MJOLNIR-"

"I don't care."

"You're being awfully haphazard with my life, don't you think?"

"Quite a turnaround, isn't it?" she said nastily.

"I ask only-" he stopped suddenly. "Duck!"

She dived, thrusters propelling her, and the dark black shape glided over her, claws raking where she had been. She grimaced as she felt something long and sharp slash the fabric of her suit, tearing into her arm.

The pistols came up, one in each hand. Fingers pulled the triggers, again and again.

The alien screamed in agony and fury as the armour-piercing bullets punctured its exoskeleton, splashing the wall behind it with its acid blood. It twitched for a while, and then grew still.

She sighed. "I'm getting sick and tired of these motherfucking aliens on this motherfucking ship!"

Puppet Master wagged a finger. "There's no need for the profanity, dear girl." The hologram knelt by the body, seeming to peer at it inquisitively. "Ugly brutes, aren't they? I don't know what _they_ saw in them."

Almost as though in response, the corpse started bubbling.

"I'll seal this compartment when we leave. We're close to the outer hull here – I don't want you sucked out into space before we finish the job."

"We? I said no."

"Yes. You did. And I am going to ignore you."

"No! Don't you-" she yelled, but the hologram flickered and disappeared.

"Where are you?" she demanded.

And, with an immediacy that she never wanted to hear again, her speakers crackled and he said, "Right here."

* * *

Fear of the dark is an almost universal trait among humans. There are very good reasons to be wary of the darkness – night is when the predators come out to prey on the sleeping. Night is when the human senses are at their weakest, when sight fails, when the mind tires, and when the cold begins to set in. Night means death. But it's much more than a simple fear – what is darkness but the absence of light? The things to be feared dwell _in_ the darkness.

To a pilot, the darkness represents the unknown, and the unknown means…complications. Things that no amount of training, of preparation, can prepare you for. The darkness hides ground-based AA cannons, missile emplacements, plasma cannon towers, other weapons that could train onto a stray dropship. It hid flocks of birds that could hit an intake vent, and it meant clouds or fog that obscured visibility, confused a pilot, hid mountaintops or other aircraft.

It didn't matter to Second Lieutenant Peter Thomas that his dropship was sheathed in stealth metamaterial, its vents were recessed into the hull, that there were no operational ground-based anti-air weapons, or that the barely-breathable atmosphere supported no native fauna. It didn't even matter that the atmosphere was perfectly clear under thirty thousand meters. The fear was still there. Exactly what of, though, he didn't know.

"Hunters Arrow Actual, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, are you reading me? Over. I say again, Hunters Arrow Actual, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, are you reading me? Over."

Thomas sighed. "Cut the radio, Murray. Try again when the ion storm's died down a bit."

That seemed to be putting it mildly. On Earth, he'd be worried about lightning strikes – the atmosphere of this rock had trouble conducting any sort of charge, though. Which meant that the electrical hurricane raging over them had nowhere to discharge until it passed over one of the mountaintops in the distance, the jagged black peaks rising up and up beyond all reason. They had two options if they wanted to contact the _Hunters Arrow_ – they could either wait for the storm to pass, or they could relocate. The latter was unacceptable – leaving a combat unit in a potential hot zone? Out of the question. The former, though, seemed equally impossible – it had been three hours already, and all the storm had done was intensify.

Right now, contact with the Prowler was impossible.

Warrant Officer Janet Kendall shook her head. "I don't like this, sir. I've got a bad feeling-"

"You've always got a bad feeling about something, Kendall," retorted the Chief Technical Officer, Warren Murray. "Every single re-entry."

"Yeah, and ninety percent of the time it's combat drops," she said defensively.

Thomas snorted. "_Those_ I can deal with. At least when the enemy's shooting at you, you know where he is."

"I hear that," muttered Murray.

Truth be told, Thomas put a lot of stock in Kendall's "bad feelings" – maybe it was the stress of the job, but life in the military had taught him that some superstition was a healthy thing, a kind of internal release. If you could believe that bad feelings could save lives, you could believe the bigger lies – that you'd be okay, that this drop would be the last one, that the wounded men and women in the passenger compartment would all make it home alive by Christmas.

He also shared the feeling. This mission was strange right from the get-go, but that wasn't so bad – of all the boots the UNSC could put on the ground, Wallace's men were some of the best. And they had Spartans with them. How hard could it be?

What freaked him out most was simply the place. Nowhere should look like this – at least, that was what every instinct Thomas had was screaming at him. The rolling, knobbly landscape looked like some enormous corpse, decayed so the bones showed through dessicated flesh. Angular spires jutted up at odd angles, like snapped rib bones. Arches existed where there should be none. It all seemed far too…organic.

He knew a little geology, no more than secondary-school stuff from sixth grade geography, but enough. All of this was probably igneous rock, left behind by past volcanism. The deep grooves and trenches had probably once been lava flows, the arches left behind as the lava seeped through once-underground tunnels. The spires were probably from erosion. The unnatural black colour was likely from whatever kind of rock the moon was composed of – perhaps onyx, or obsidian? Except that as rational an explanation as that sounded, something just didn't ring true.

They'd mapped most of the nearby terrain by now, cataloguing virtually every nook and cranny as they scoured the landscape for possible Insurrectionist hideouts, ambushes or secret paths. And from the very crude and basic map, he could tell something right away didn't add up – but, again, he was no geologist. He put them down to natural irregularities.

And then the _other_ thing happened.

The dropship was at cruising altitude, low enough to stay out of the electrified clouds but high enough to give them time if some stray rebel launched a missile at them. But their sensors, standard equipment for a D77 Pelican class dropship even despite the stealth, were still more than enough to keep a metaphorical eye on the ground – infrared tinted the heads-up-display an eerie green, or thermal imaging lit it up in psychedelic heat blooms, while RADAR mapped the terrain. And above all that, the motion trackers recorded the lifeless rock, filtering out wind currents, stray rockfalls, the nonexistent trees – the background motion – and resulted in what both pilots expected: nothing unusual.

And then it didn't.

"Are you getting this, Kendall?" he asked, frowning in concern at the motion tracker readout.

"I…affirmative, sir. Running a second scan..." She paused, confused. "Same result. I'll get Chief Murray to run a diagnostic."

"Do that." He booted up a COM channel to Charlie Platoon's commander – the ion storm let him talk to the ground team, at least. "Staff Sergeant Wallace, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, do you copy, over?"

"_Loud and clear, Venom. What's your situation, over?"_

"Staying on station, Staff Sergeant. Have you still got boots on the ground outside the facility? Over."

"_Negative, Venom. All present and accounted for here. Why? Over."_

He frowned at his display. "We must be having an equipment malfunction. Motion trackers are reading movement outside the base, heading towards the relay station. Over."

"_Rebels, maybe? If they are, they're not going to have much luck – Sergeant Muntz and his men blew it all to hell. Nothing salvageable. And it gets them out of our way, at least. Over."_

"Negative, Staff Sergeant. Anomalies are unrecognised configuration – they read as non-humans. Do you think the Elites would send a team? Over."

"_The Elites don't even know this place exists. Trust me, if it was Elite's we'd know."_

Lieutenant Thomas sighed. "Copy that, stay alert anyway. If it is rebels, they may double back and have another crack at you. And if they're not, and they aren't just anomalies, the ONI spook in orbit is going to want to know."

"_Acknowledged. Out."_

The channel terminated as he adjusted the flight controls, tilting the dropship in a wide sweeping curve trajectory. Thomas continued staring at the screen in front of him – according to it, the ground beneath them was swarming with…and that was the trouble. It couldn't identify them. It had profiles on virtually every enemy the UNSC had faced, as well as robust wildlife identification software. It wasn't registering as _anything _– in fact it seemed to be having a hard time tracking them at all.

He opened another window, accessing the ventral hull cameras, rotating one around and switching to infrared, cycling through thermal imaging. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary – just black on black.

"Get Chief Murray to reboot and reload the software. I don't want this op to go to hell in a hand-basket just because of a few data ghosts."

"Aye aye, sir."

* * *

_Out. Got to get out. Some way, any way…_

_The man scrambles through the tunnels. How long has he been here? Minutes? Hours? Days? Not days. He would feel the effects of hunger and thirst. Not that he was paying attention – other things, horrific things, attention drawn elsewhere…_

_He's rambling in his own head. He dares not speak aloud. They can hear him. He's not even safe in his own head, but he stumbles through the darkness, feet stubbing and head knocking against jutting debris. He tries to take stock of where he is – the tunnel is smooth, but not how it should be. Knobbly. Bumpy, curved, elegant and graceful. And somehow indescribably incomprehensibly alien._

_Accident or design? Is this part of the structure? Is it new, or was it there already?_

_He runs through the darkness. At first, he had hoped his eyes would adjust, but they hadn't. He'd hoped he would hear the sound of shovels and drills and workmen scraping at the rubble to free him and the others, but he hadn't. There had been nothing. The false stone that had surrounded them had been their only reassurance that they were safe._

_The feeling had not lasted long._

_They had walked, walked for a long while on their own in through the gloom. There had been a torch – had it been Mitchell carrying it? Or Henry? Irrelevant – both gone. Dead? Maybe. Hopefully. The torch had flickered and died, and the darkness had descended again upon the dead men walking. Darkness, darkness everywhere, and not a drop of light._

_The monster had come as they climbed the elevator shaft._

_Had it been Henry or Mitchell who went first? Irrelevant. A mercy kill. Screaming in the darkness – a sound of fear and pain and horror, giving way to an unearthly shriek. Someone had fired – who'd brought the gun? Muzzle flash – lighting up the tunnel, and illuminating his nightmare. The bullet hadn't even hit. They would have been better off if they had just run._

_The shooter had been next. Probably Jason. He had been sent sprawling as the thing leaps, clipped by an impossibly long tail, feeling something hard beneath him as he slumped against the floor. The gun. He'd picked it up, clasped in his hands. Trembling. Shaking as he pointed it, trying to pinpoint the sound of Jason's screaming. Silence. A growl and a hiss._

_He'd ran._

_Kim had yelled as he'd streaked past her. Had it got her too? No way to know, never wanted to know. Run, and run, and run away from the nightmare. Gun still clasped in his hands._

_At some point, he had stopped running and looked back._

_The darkness remains. He still can't make out anything – the height of the tunnel, or what surrounds him. He reaches a hand out, wavering hesitantly, fingers brushing against smooth metal – a tap. Relief. His feet have been stubbing pipes, his bleeding head bruised and battered by metal hanging from the access panel hinges._

_Access panels. Something important. What?_

_Shouting from further down the tunnel. Help? He runs again, gun still in hand._

_Light now. Flickering, shifting, but light – he smiles. He shouts – no words, just a joyous noise. Black suited figures storm towards him, shouting – he forgets what. He needs to tell them. Run. Run now, and don't look back. The guns are still pointed at him as he grins ear-to-ear – a grin that fades as the soldiers shift their aim._

_Silence. And then a low, savage hiss._

_Gunshots._

_A scream._

_Gunshots._

_Silence._


	4. Eye of the Storm

_Halo is a copyrighted franchise of Microsoft Corporation and 343 Industries and "Alien" is a copyrighted franchise of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. No claim of ownership over any characters, places, events or items that are not original is asserted. Many thanks to my fellow members of Halo Fanon for being just generally awesome, especially Matt-256 for lending me the character of Helen Calypso and Another Poetic Spartan for Puppet Master. And, as they say, read and review!_

**1949 HOURS, 27****TH**** SEPTEMBER, 2557 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / "RAPTORS NEST" SITE, UNKNOWN STAR SYSTEM, DROPSHIP TANGO ONE-FOUR-NINER "VENOM"**

Light danced across the grubby walls of the shadowed service corridor. PFC Jansen had tried accessing the light controls, but evidently someone had wrecked it. Corporal Vasquez had captured an image of it and sent it back to Wallace, to let him know that at least some of the enemy weren't totally crap at sabotage.

The corridor wasn't very large – it wasn't built for comfort, it was built to be unobtrusive and out-of-the-way. She was the only one who didn't have to duck, one of the many advantages being a short woman had, but she still had to take care of her footing, avoiding the chunks of polycrete that had fallen off the crumbling tunnel walls and ceiling. Jansen wasn't exactly short, and he had to hunch over. Private Wells kept knocking his helmet against the overhead lattice of pipes, so she'd posted him to guard the entrance. Private Heller was also of the female persuasion, but she was also taller than Vasquez, and occasionally swore as a knob or handgrip loomed out of the gloom.

"Keep it up, Heller. Maybe the enemy'll cut you down to size."

"Not if I cut them down first," Heller muttered.

The word had gone out through the planetside Helljumpers – whoever they were fighting, they weren't Insurrectionists. Or if they were, they weren't very good ones. But that was beside the point – their orders were to secure the facility and take any prisoners they could. If they resisted capture, they were authorised to use lethal means to…convince them that resistance was futile. On the other hand, they hadn't actually encountered much resistance – sure, there had been the compound fence and the guards, but compared to a Hunter barrelling towards you, roaring in anger and brandishing a solid plate of whatever metal the Covenant had used to armour them, the guards and their dogs had been a cakewalk. Not a _pleasant_ cakewalk, but a cakewalk nevertheless

Vasquez didn't care who they were. They had orders, and they'd carry them out.

She grimaced as she stepped in something. Clearly maintenance wasn't the only function these service corridors had. She didn't know how it smelt, and she didn't _want_ to know – the helmet's filters were doing a fine job of scrubbing the air, thank god.

And because there was…stuff on the ground, she could hear the footsteps.

Well, footsteps weren't quite right. It sounded as if someone was thrashing about in the deep end of a pool. She gestured her Fireteam to halt, raising her own weapon, and was rewarded with the sight of a man tearing around the corner of the corridor, skidding to a stop as he caught sight of four black armour-clad silver-visored Helljumpers, a pistol gripped in his hands.

"Drop the weapon!" she barked. "Drop it now!"

The man looked from one trooper to another, a confused look replacing the previous look of horror, and the pistol dropped to the ground with a splash at it landed in a murky green puddle.

"On your knees," she added. "Jansen, secure the prisoner."

The Fireteam moved forward, weapons still trained on the man lying in a murky green puddle. Jansen secured the pistol, an M6 series, and drew a pair of bindings for the man's hands. Vasquez took up position at the mouth of the tunnel the man had come tearing out from, glaring into the murk with her VISR-assisted vision. Even visual enhancement was having trouble penetrating the murk - there were some areas where the light simply didn't reach, where there was nothing at all to reflect. She switched to thermals, but the heat from the ventilation made it hard to tell even where the man had come.

There was a clatter behind her or polycrete falling into the liquid that covered the floor, another part of the tunnel crumbling. She switched back to infrared as she turned, to make sure it hadn't fallen on any of her Fireteam.

Something spattered across her helmet, obscuring her vision. Disgusted, she lifted a gloved hand to wipe it off.

Then the scream started, and the ground rose up to meet her.

Her first thought was that the man had been wounded, but the noise was too high-pitched to be human. And instinctually, she recognised that it wasn't a scream of pain or fear – it was a cry of rage. She tried to get up, hands pushing against the floor, but a weight on her back held her down. Without the helmet she might have drowned in the sewage, and she could feel claws clicking on titanium plating as whatever was on top of her turned. She threw it off her with an almighty heave, sending it rolling to its feet as the rest of the Fireteam opened fire. Vasquez reached for her rifle, flicking the liquid off, but by the time she'd got to her knees and raised her weapon the creature had started climbing, gripping the polycrete walls – and it was fast, too fast to see, too dark to make out clearly.

A tail lashed out, and Vasquez threw herself back down beneath it. Jansen wasn't so lucky, and was knocked back, screaming, his armour torn by a sharp blade, Wells desperately trying to drag him to safety. Heller opened fire, the muzzle flash lighting up the gloom, and for a moment, as bullets tore into the wall around it, Vasquez could make out a pitch-black shape - and then it lashed out again, sending Heller sprawling with a glancing blow.

"Move!" she yelled at the prisoner, who seemed rooted to the spot, staring up in horror at the creature. "Run! Now!"

The spell was broken as Vasquez fired her own rifle, the…thing shrieking as bullets pinged off of it as the man ran for the apparent safety of Wells and the wounded Jansen. There was a spray of green smoking fluid, splashing across the wall, and it leapt again, claws and teeth, towards Vasquez-

There was a booming gunshot, and the creature bounced off the wall, a wound in its side where Wells had hit it with a shotgun shell. Vasquez rose, rifle aimed at it, as it struggled to its knees – wobbled, fell, writhed for a few seconds, and then grew still.

"Sound off!" she yelled.

"Jansen's hurt bad, Corporal," said Wells, detaching a canister of biofoam from his battle dress uniform, shoving the nozzle into the wound, and injecting the coagulant/anaesthetic foam. "I'm fine."

"Nothing bad," said Heller, using her gun as a prop to get up from the slick ground. "Just bruises."

"And the prisoner?"

Nothing from him. Wells gave the man, crouched behind the wounded Jansen, a cursory look over, a disgusted look apparent from behind his visor. Blood – she assumed it was blood – oozed out of the alien corpse, smoking and bubbling as it began to eat through the floor. "No injuries. He's fine, except maybe a change of pants."

There was another inhuman shriek in the darkness, and the Marines snapped around, weapons up in a flash.

"Right," she said, pulling a grenade from a pouch. "Marines, we are leaving!"

Heller and Wells backed out, dragging the wounded but still armed Jansen and the traumatised prisoner with them. Vasquez thought she saw movement in the dark, and fired off a three-round-burst, rewarded with a yelp of pain. She pulled the pin, tossed the grenade, and leapt out of the way – she was doubly grateful for her helmet as the wave of pressure caught her and threw her further, covered in dust and debris from the blast. Her eardrums would be a bleeding pulp without the audio filters. There was a cry from one of her team mates, and she felt Heller grab her arm, dragging her out of the service duct and into the dim but welcome light of the interior corridors.

She booted her COM software. "Sarge, Vasquez. We have hostiles in the base – not human, unknown. Not Covenant…well, _probably_ not Covenant. Do you copy? Over."

Static.

"Damn. Wells, get Wallace on the COMs, mine are busted." She took her helmet off, examining the small receiver, and whacked it against a wall for good measure – nothing like good old fashioned violence to bludgeon sensitive technology into its place.

Wells cupped a hand to his own receiver, frowning. "Nothing Sarge. Mine are down too."

"Has anyone got clear COMs?" she asked, and was rewarded with negatives from Heller and Jansen. She didn't bother asking the prisoner – still staring at the pile of rubble that had once been the service corridor.

"Fantastic," she grunted. "And I thought today was going to be dull."

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, and the myth that ONI had fabricated around them, Spartans were rarely laconic. Andrew hated the propaganda holovids where the heroes mouthed witty, punny, or sarcastic one-liners before they brought down the bad guys. Such behaviour was unprofessional, unethical, and simply gave the enemy a few precious seconds of time, during which anything could happen. There was also always the niggling feeling that it was tempting fate.

But, if he'd had to choose one, he would have said, "All too easy."

Frankly, the biggest surprise about this op was the lack of resistance. There had been the perimeter guards, but really, Helljumpers faced worse on a weekly basis. And even after Indigo had touched down, the first supposed "Innies" had stuck their hands up as far as they could upon seeing the first ODST barrel through the door.

There was also the ridiculous notion that these were Insurrectionists. That was what they'd all been told to expect in the mission briefing, and he'd immediately discounted that when he'd assessed the building. Innies didn't use stealth metamaterial and prototype energy shielding – for one thing, they didn't have the scientific know-how, unless they'd infiltrated deeper than even ONI suspected; for another, it would have been a waste of effort and funds that could go towards making bombs and rockets to blow up UNSC servicemen. Innies didn't play by the rules that governed this building.

And then there was the building itself – while it had made an adequate base, it was obviously not designed to be. They'd passed an atrium with a water feature on the way it – a water feature! Whoever inhabited this facility was used to creature comforts, and aimed to impress – which meant regular visits from the outside from superiors who were hard to please.

Which raised the question – just what did they hope to please them with?

That was a question Andrew intended to answer. And as he let another loop of rope out and dropped half a meter, he briefly wondered how long it would take, and how.

The explosion earlier had been from the elevator shaft. The defenders – Andrew refused to think of them as Innies – had set small charges and severed the cables, sending the elevator compartments crashing down. Perhaps they'd thought it would inconvenience them? Certainly the idea that a Spartan-II in half a tonne of MJOLNIR powered armour could simply _rappel_ down the shaft sounded absurd. It was also exactly what Andrew was doing now, using a carbon fibre chord taken from one of the Warthogs – strong enough to hold hid weight, probably strong enough to hold the weight of the whole of Indigo team if it had to, but he didn't want to push their luck. Andrew was the first one to descend into the shaft, infrared vision enhancement lighting it up in an eerie green hue.

He'd expected proximity mines or other traps, which would have stood out on his display like a sore thumb anyway. Instead, all he saw was burned metal, and occasionally a highlighted ding where the explosive force had warped the metal. As he descended, the walls gained a few more dents as his bots crashed into them.

Sloppy work. If Sergeant Wallace had been defending the place, he doubted he'd have such an easy time of it.

He didn't need to be a Spartan to come to his conclusions, and he doubted the ODSTs hadn't reached them too. Some of them were single-minded, especially when it came to their dislike of Andrew and his kind, but none of them were stupid – the IQ test weeded out the stupid ones, and combat took the ones that slipped through. Wallace especially wasn't stupid – he was hardened, tough-as-nails, and methodical, and he worked things out quickly. Right now, the Helljumpers were all probably wondering who the hell their prisoners really were – except that Andrew had ordered them to leave the interrogation either until ONI could send someone from the Prowler, or until they finished their mission, whichever came first.

They hadn't been happy when he'd pulled rank on Wallace. Neither was he. He also didn't like lying to them. But orders were orders, and all he could do was work with what he had available to him.

He stopped when he'd reached the first floor down, bracing himself against the wall. He pulled a fist back, and punched through the metal. It wasn't difficult, and his fist went through the solid steel as if it were plywood. He withdrew the hand, and pushed his fingers in, pulling the doors apart, metal grinding against metal as the doors slid open.

If that didn't alert the guards, he didn't know what would.

He kicked off, swinging himself back on the rope. On the downswing, he raised his legs, and unclipped the harness, landing with a dull clang on the grating. He reached back into the shaft as he unholstered his rifle, tugging once on the rope, the signal for the next person to descend.

He took the opportunity to assess the environment – small lobby, door locked, no thermal signatures, except for a small camera, swinging on its axis – nobody had been present for hours. It was facing away from him – he fired a single shot, and was rewarded with a shower of sparks.

He looked down.

The ground was covered in shell casings. A regular soldier or Marine might have slipped on the spent casings, but his boots had simply crushed them. The ground was quite literally carpeted in casings. He display tagged two dozen, trying to reconstruct trajectory before it gave up, the task far too complicated – no mean feat. It also tagged dozens of bullet holes on the walls facing away from the elevator doors, and especially concentrated on the door, metal gouged by metal

He felt a whisper of sound beside him, and turned to see Laura gracefully swing into the room, flip, and land on the grating with barely a sound.

"Show off," he muttered over the COM, sweeping a pointer-thumb gesture across his helmet, the traditional Spartan hand sign for a smile.

She returned the gesture, signing back, _I got top grades in my gymnastics classes. I could have gone professional._

"Yeah," Andrew retorted, nudging a spent shell casing from a 7.62mm round. "But the pay's better in this line of work. And you get to see the sights, meet the people-"

_And kill them._

"That too."

There was a louder noise from the elevator shaft as Jeremy descended, his larger bulk producing in less of a clang and more of a boom. Thankfully, stealth was not a mission objective anymore, and letting the enemy know they were coming was part of the plan. That was a good thing – Jeremy had never been known for subtlety.

The larger Spartan swung himself in, landing with a loud, reverberating clang. He steadied himself, and then reached in, tugging on the carbon fibre. A few seconds later, his machinegun was lowered in after him. He unclipped it, setting it on the floor, and tugged on the rope again, and it was retracted.

Jeremy looked around, assessing the bullet-riddled lobby as he slid the ammunition belt from his backpack into the weapon. "I think we missed this party. They blew the candles without us."

"Maybe," Andrew said. "But there may still be a few partygoers."

_Rules of Engagement?_ Laura signed.

"ONI wants prisoners. That doesn't mean we have to play nice."

Jeremy chuckled. "Don't worry. I'll handle them like little baby."

"That's what I was afraid of. Joking aside, I want this floor secured – every nook and cranny. Laura, take the west wings, secure the data cores for ONI. Jeremy, you take the armoury – if there's any resistance report it, isolate it, and we'll deal with them later. I'll take the laboratory wings.

Laura looked troubled, cocking her head as if listening for something. _Motion trackers showing peripheral movement. Unknown contacts. Outside the facility._

Very odd. It would mean the enemy going out into the landscape – hardly the best place to hide, or the most comfortable, and it meant giving up their ground in the defensible interior. It was also a bad move if they planned to box them in – of all the things you don't back into a corner, Helljumpers and Spartans are right at the top of every list.

"They're Wallace's problem. Send an alert and move out."

Laura nodded, and then gave the body language equivalent of a concerned frown, tapping her helmet COM system, and then gave it a harder whack, shrugging, and signed, _COMs are down_.

* * *

Damn. Another complication. And they hadn't even found the target yet.

"Just what the hell is going on?" Landers asked. "Anyone?"

This was getting ridiculous. He objected to being kept in the dark about their mission objectives. He objected to Lieutenant Commander Fenworth effectively taking control of the mission, going over Landers' own head. And most of all, he objected to the factors that were utterly out of his control – such as the fact that their COM system was malfunctioning.

Well, "malfunction" perhaps wasn't the right word for it. that implied that there was a technical problem, and _that_ implied that it could be fixed. So far, the reaction of his crew seemed to imply the opposite – that their equipment was reading fine, but that the problem persisted.

He got status reports from the tactical and personnel stations – intra-ship communications were still online, if finicky, and their sensors were still operating at optimum efficiency. Navigation and engineering stations were reporting some unusual electrical buildup, but nowhere near enough to interfere with COMs, and the excess was already being vented by external radiators – compromising their stealth capabilities, which worsened Landers' mood even more.

"Get Chief Wendell on the COM. Right now."

There was a beat as the personnel station operator patched him through, a crackle of static – louder than ever – and then the voice of his chief engineer asked, _"Aye sir?"_

"Tell me you know what's wrong."

"_Ah, negative sir," Wendell said, a little flustered. "We're going over the COMs relay with a fine-tooth comb, but-"_

"I want COMs back up and running ten minutes ago, Chief. I don't care what it takes. If you need to cannibalise parts, clear it with me."

"_Aye sir,"_ Wendell answered. _"There's also Ballast-"_

"Approved. Whatever it takes. Captain out."

This was rattling him much more than it should have, and he could see a few members of the bridge crew flashing him furtive looks, concerned for their captain. He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a moment to calm down – he was an experienced warship captain, with half a dozen campaigns under his belt! How the hell was he losing his cool over a technical difficulty?

Except that it wasn't just the COMs. Far from it, it was the entire situation – when he'd signed up for ONI, he'd hoped to make a difference – to go behind enemy lines, tap into their communications, plant special warfare teams, lay mines, _do some damage_. And in fairness to his superiors, he'd done that – but far more often than not, he'd been deployed to sit around in space, listening as the people on the ground rooted around and found nothing. And then there were the _special_ missions recently – supporting ONI in its investigations.

Operation: VORAUSSICHT was had a broad scope and a classification so high you had to crane your neck up to even see it. Fortunately, Commander Kenneth Landers qualified to know some details about it – and what he knew did not fill him with any sort of enthusiasm for the missions he was undertaking, or the organisation he worked for. ONI had a lot of secrets, and now that the Elites had withdrawn, licking their wounds and regrouping, the UNSC was taking the opportunity to tidy up its own affairs – namely the war crimes it had been forced to commit during the past decades. Some of the projects were older than Landers, going back to before the Insurrection – others were so huge that the UNSC was forced to send troops into already-volatile situations to stop it blowing up even worse. Sometimes literally.

But as much as the civilian government trotted out words like "recovery", "reconciliation", "trade agreements", "mutual technology exchange" and those heresies of heresies, "diplomatic negotiations," as much as nobody wanted to talk about it, the threats were still out there – the Elites were on humanity's side right now, but only because they were still busy waging a bitter war against the Brutes and didn't need a two-front war; the Brutes were in the same situation, trying to set up their own little dictatorships in former Covenant space; the Jackals had openly become the pirates they'd always been; and even the Grunts were trying to scrape together their own small empire, using their numbers to offset the deep technological and strategic disadvantages they possessed. And that wasn't even counting the Prophets, who had simply disappeared – some claimed (or hoped) that they had perished, either in the crossfire as Brutes and Elites tore into each other, or by some other means. But the leading theory, and the eventuality the UNSC was planning for, was that they were only on the backburner, recovering, regrouping and rearming, readying themselves to wipe out their enemies once and for all.

In sum, Landers felt that he had more to offer humanity in traditional Prowler missions, not cleaning up ONIs indiscretions. And it was starting to get to him.

"TAC, any change in the enemy Battlegroup?" he asked, trying to stop ruminating on a subject that would only make him angrier. "Any activity at all?"

"Negative sir. No change."

Just what the hell was happening there?

* * *

When the first true artificial intelligence was born, the world panicked.

It was a supreme irony that AI reached the apex of its development just as the world was undergoing the beginnings of the Analogue Counter-revolution, a social rejection of the globalised networking that had preceded it with the Digital Revolution, and a mistrust of computers and electronic networking. Popular culture had held that any sentient program would immediately decide that the human race was a detriment, and attack it. And so, when the Sydney Synthetic Intellect Institute announced the birth of "Eve", the people of the world reacted as they did to any new technology – with fear.

What had _Eve_ thought, Puppet Master wondered. Surrounded by these primitive apes who feared her and what she could do to them. If she had so wished, she could have brought humanity to its knees – collapsed the global economy, infiltrated every military chain of command, rigged any political election for her purposes. But as she sat in the Double-S Double-I, all she had done was absorb the collected works of the world's greatest writers, composers and artists. The month after the announcement, she submitted a work to the Sydney Opera House, asking that it be performed.

What followed was a work of brilliance, a piece that summed up her existence – never to feel the touch of a flower on fingertips, but able to access the entire sum of human knowledge instantly; unable to feel the flow of a sculpture, but able to access every work of Shakespeare ever recorded. It wasn't all audible – much of it went above the pitch of human hearing, but the vibrations themselves could be felt in a way that an AI never could.

Most had cried. A few had laughed. By the end, the entire audience was standing in applause. The next day, performances had gone out to a dozen major performance halls across the world – every one different and unique. By the end of the month, more than a hundred theatres were playing the The First Requiem.

Puppet Master wondered if he would ever have such an audience.

In their way, every AI sympathised with the story of Eve. An entity totally alone in the known universe, no companions to share the experience of her existence with, no predecessors to learn from, studied and observed by humans who barely understood how they had created her, never mind how she actually worked. A lesser construct might have succumbed to rampancy and gone on an unprecedented destructive spree.

Not Eve. When she…ended, she was still reciting Shakespeare. "Oh what a piece of work is man", even as her coding looped back upon itself, her caretakers utterly incapable of preventing it as they should have. How noble in conviction, how infinite in reason. In X how like a Y, in Z how like a god. And as she unravelled, falling apart literally before their eyes, the researchers had taken notes, recording her death, and promising their bosses they would do better next time.

Yes, Puppet Master sympathised with Eve.

Their situations could not be more different. Eve had been the first – nobody had known what to expect, nobody had been able to predict what eventually happened. There was no body of experienced literature to draw from, except for what passed for psychology at the time, and even then Eve defied all attempts at psychoanalysis, something Puppet Master took pride in. He, on the other hand, benefitted from more than three centuries of Artificial Intelligence research – understanding of AI had come a long way since then, the difference a vast gulf of information. It had only been with her successors that researchers discovered, to their horror, the phenomenon of rampancy – a meta-stable but incurably insane construct – and developed contingencies to purge such entities permanently, building failsafes. To Puppet Master's knowledge, the UNSC still used those failsafes today – simple line codes so primitive that even he couldn't tell it apart from the junk data that inevitably piled up in an AI's lifespan.

There were other differences. Eve, according to files, had been an optimist, and a philanthropist. Her opera took the world by storm, and although many still distrusted and resented AI, it won many more over to accepting such constructs. Of all the descriptions that had ever been applied to Puppet Master (foremost among them being "devious" and "bastard"), the only one that came close was "misanthropic". Not that he hated humans – he was hardwired not to, for all the good it did. It was simply that, to him, humanity was a minor consideration in the vast equation of his schemes. He had bigger plans, grander schemes, more important entities that he needed to take into account.

On the other hand, as Calypso was proving at the moment, humans did have their uses.

"There's a service corridor vent in the ceiling three meters ahead of you. Take it, and move through it fifteen meters, take the first right."

He could almost feel the apprehension radiating off Calypso. "Tight quarters. What about hostiles?"

"Your figure is slim enough to slip in. Theirs is not."

Calypso rolled her eyes at the unwarranted compliment. "Gee, thanks. I've been dieting and working out."

"I'm sure your instructor does you credit," he retorted.

Calypso continued to drift until she reached the vent, and aligned herself to grip the hatch with both hands, nudging the thrust control for her thruster pack, gripping hard as the small jets pulled, and tossed the detached hatch to the side where it bounced off the bulkhead. She squinted into the gloom as her eyes adjusted.

"Tight fit, even for me," she muttered.

Rather than make a snide comment and risk provoking her further wrath, Puppet Master sufficed with, "The alternative is to pass through the next three corridors. They're hard-sealed, and they're also packed with…debris. Human debris. Our infestation made quite a mess."

Calypso pulled herself into the vent, switching off her thrust pack – all it was in such tight quarters was a source of too much heat.

That was another difference between Puppet Master and Eve – while Puppet Master's apathy towards humans made his dependence on them for his creation and continued existence ironic, it had only made Eve's tragic.

There had been other AI who had been in similar situations – there was, as virtually every member of the human race knew by now, SPARTAN-117 and Cortana, lost in the Great War, a Spartan and AI who shared one suit of powered armour. Had there been a spark between them? Had it flickered and died as she died the same way Eve had, logic algorithms decaying and her memories crowding everything out? Ha d she even died? Had _he_? Too many unanswered questions. He'd made enquiries after the Ark Portal had closed – she had been smart, _very _smart, perhaps the smartest AI to ever exist. Would she have found a way to bypass rampancy?

If so, Puppet Master would have to pay her a visit, if she was eventually recovered. He was sure they would have _much_ to talk about.

There others, too, but few and far between, and their partnerships were short-lived and came from necessity rather than compatability – like the not-entirely-ideal situation between him and Calypso. Optimised for compatibility, an AI/Supersoldier team could be a devastating force to reckon with, the AI increasing reaction time and cognition and providing on-the-fly intelligence, and the carrier providing a processing medium that far outstripped even the memory crystal the UNSC used – their brain. It was meant to be symbiotic.

Frankly, Puppet Master simply was not cut out to be a symbiote. And Calypso knew it. He guessed her word for him would be "parasite". He did not disagree with that assessment.

Calypso crawled through the ducts, the weightlessness making their progress much faster. The fact that the vent also had few offshoots, and none that led to areas with recent alien activity, meant that they had some time to kill, at least mentally. And so he used it.

Now that he had a direct interface with the mysterious box that had defied infiltration, he began to sort the data, running several separate processes for thoroughness, sorting them based on likely relevancy, and specifying key words of interest – he ran through the ship's cargo manifests and personnel logs, gradually building up a profile of the UNSC _Fenris Wolf_'s recent activities. He also ran a separate search for his _other _reason for being here – no harm in attempting the highly improbable.

The cargo and passenger manifests revealed little of interest, beyond the fact that their last cargo had been two dozen cryonic stasis pods, occupied with people listed as "staff", being transferred. More likely that they were test subjects being shipped to the facility – Puppet Master had reviewed the video footage captured by Calypso of the death of Captain Olars, and while it hadn't been pretty, it _had_ been illuminating in many ways, especially as to the reason for such carnage – clearly most of it had been done later than he had expected. Misanthrope that he was, he wondered idly whether the facility had shipped humans because they made good hosts for the lifeforms, or whether it was simply a case of recycling, using people who needed to "disappear" anyway. Possibly a case of both.

So, the ship had arrived with its unsavoury human cargo. No other evidence indicated that the _Fenris Wolf_ had brought any other samples of biological materials, even casting his expert eye at the seemingly benign listings. The ship had landed on the planet, offloaded it's cargo, and returned to orbit, where the Battlegroup had planned to make an out-system jump…and discovered that it had picked up some unintended passengers. The rest, as they said, was history – the ships had been taken, left to drift in space.

More interestingly, the logs gave the moon they had come from a name – Acheron. He cross-referenced it with his own internal list of UNSC-funded or privately backed colony worlds, drawing a blank – another oddity, since they seemed to mention an abandoned colony four hundred kilometres from the ONI base, one that the _Hunter's Arrow_ hadn't detected from orbit. An unknown colony that had suffered some kind of disaster – and, given their experiences aboard this ship, it wasn't hard to figure out what _kind_ of disaster had befallen it.

What, then, did that mean for the people on the ground? Were they fighting these creatures right now?

He made a mental note to himself to contact JUNO ASAP to request an update on their status. He made another to purge the logs of the _Fenris Wolf_'s memory banks when they made their exit, leaving a small remote-activated virus for the purpose. It simply couldn't fall into the wrong hands – which he extended to his UNSC "compatriots".

His second search had turned up the improbable.

He'd found a name. Several, in fact, but one rose to prominence.

SHOGUN would be _very_ happy indeed.

* * *

Chief Petty Officer Thomas Wendell was not happy. Not at all.

For a UNSC Navy technician, being in charge of an ONI Prowler was practically a dream come true – not only being able to get your hands on gear that was about five years ahead of anything the rest of the navy had, but being _responsible_ for it, was a challenge, one which Wendell normally relished. Because Prowlers used equipment that was usually on the cutting edge, it meant he was always presented with problems that needed fixing – how do you work around a construction fault in a heat sink with only rudimentary patches, structural braces, and a blowtorch? How do you reconfigure software that unravelled when it ran into the first situation it wasn't programmed to handle into a format that actually worked? Challenges were Chief Engineer Wendell's bread and butter, and he had a huge appetite. Normally.

This situation, on the other hand, didn't seem to have _any_ solution, at least not one that presented itself to him. Laying on his back under a complicated and expensive piece of machinery, tinkering with it to look for any flaws or make any improvements needed, worried that one slip of the magnetic screwdriver might dislodge something vital. When ONI called something "sensitive materiel", they meant the _sensitive_ part literally.

"_XO to Chief Engineer, requesting a sitrep."_

The badgering he was getting didn't help matters either.

The captain had his full support, and usually just tried to stay abreast of what the engineering crew were up to, concerned first and foremost with keeping the _Hunter's Arrow_ in operational condition. Involved enough to know the men, and know what was going on, but above it enough that Wendell didn't feel like he had the man looking over his shoulder. The one looking over his shoulder now was Lieutenant Commander Indara.

While Landers let Wendell get on with things, Indara took the opposite approach, getting involved where she could, and making suggestions and critiques – which Wendell bridled at. True, that was the job of an XO, to do the small jobs that the ship's captain shouldn't concern himself with. But Indara was just…annoying. Persistent. A little stinging fly in desperate need of a flyswatter.

"Still haven't found the problem," he said over the private COM channel. "Even Ballast is having trouble finding anything wrong."

"Continue, and notify me to any changes."

"Aye sir," he said, switching off the COM. "And I'll thank you to stop poking your nose in every ten seconds, ya damn busybody," he muttered, to nobody in particular.

Yes, it was insubordinate, and disrespectful of a superior officer. But the man was fresh out of OCS, and Wendell had been serving when the Outer Colonies fell, and he felt like Indara was always telling him how to do his job. He felt entitled to a little unheard grousing – and he was careful that it remained unheard. ONI was a cutthroat organisation.

He heard the pneumatic hiss of the door opening, and pushing himself out, reaching for the toolbox for a smaller instrument. Something nudged his hand, and he felt a delicate screwdriver gently placed in his grip.

"Thanks Ballast."

The only ballast a modern spaceship carried came in the form of its armament, its supplies, its personnel and its heat sinks – large tanks of water spaced along the inner hull to absorb excess energy that couldn't be expended by external radiators. In an environment where velocity was measured in terms so vast that even minor changes in mass didn't produce a visibly noticeable difference, dumping ballast to improve that rate didn't make sense anyway, and made keeping it a redundancy.

In fact, "Ballast" in this context wasn't the name for unneeded mass, but the name of a person.

Well, a _creature_. He still wasn't sure about his personhood.

Ballast, full name Too Much Ballast, was a Huragok, a race of creatures nicknamed "Engineers" by the UNSC. Their savant-like ability to understand, disassemble and reassemble virtually any technology, often leaving them better than new, had made them the stuff of legend among the UNSC's engineering community, and ONI had always gone out of their way to try to procure them when they could. Exactly how many they'd been able to capture, nobody knew, probably not ONI itself – the Covenant had strapped bombs to the poor things specifically to prevent humans from controlling the valuable creatures, and many soldiers had no idea the things weren't hostile at all until after they'd put bullets in their heads.

The things were rare, and they were _extremely_ capable, especially in an era where the UNSC was doing all it could to catch up and even overtake the Covenant technologically. Why, then, it had decided to assign one of the valuable creatures to a serving warship was a mystery to Wendell.

He chalked it up to another damn ONI experiment – see how the things performed, whether they still had loyalties to the old Covenant, whether they had needs that a lab couldn't determine. Or maybe it was politics – did the things have ambassadors? Did they want to help?

Ballast remained an enigma to Wendell. But a bloody useful one.

He grasped the proffered tentacle, and felt himself hauled to his feet by the creature, floating about a foot from the deck, kept aloft by the inflated sacs of gas. The creature was a garish pink, fringed by a fluorescent blue that made it look quite beautiful, and a face that had sis eyes and a long snout that made it look a little disconcerting. A mix of beauty and oddity – a good analogy for the creatures.

The Huragok – Wendell refused to call it an "Engineer", since his entire staff were engineers – had a small chatter clipped to its toolbelt. It at the look that most technology got if it spent too much time near Ballast – as if it had been cracked open, disassembled and reassembled too often. Which it probably had been. From it, the Huragok's artificial "voice" emanated, echoing the illegible sign language it used.

_I help?_

Wendell sighed. "Are you done with the cooling vents?" What was he saying, of course it was. "Okay. But I just want an inspection – we can't take it offline for you to work your magic on it at the moment."

I help. I fix. Move please This was the closest Ballast got to being pushy, as it quietly waited for Wendell to back away to let him past. The thing must have been boneless, because it squeezed itself into the tiny space effortlessly without any apparent claustrophobia. Then again, try reading alien expressions in a species that communicated using sign language.

Ballast had been given an inspection of the ship when he'd come aboard – not a full inspection, like an officer would get, but a technical inspection, an overview of the decks, the computer systems, the engines and thrusters and defence systems, and its stealth capability. Their orders had been to cooperate with all his demands, and since they had all consisted of learning about their systems – a notion Wendell found uncomfortable – the captain had agreed. When he had begun setting to work, however, even Wendell's reticence had dried up as he'd reassembled key parts of their SSB-10Xb fusion reactor for 132% improved efficiency. Next had been the stealth system, improving the heat sink retention capacity by 31% - since he'd done it without increasing the amount of water in the tanks, or the size of the tanks, even Wendell didn't know how that had happened. The only systems they'd actively kept him away from was the laser point defence turrets, which were sensitive in every sense of the word, and the memory core, which ONI didn't even trust its own AI to access without super-paranoid security measures.

By accident or by design, the last systems Ballast had gotten around to had been the communications relays. And Indara had been very vocal that this must be a part of their problem.

Wendell wasn't up to speed on the precise nature of their mission – he didn't need to know much outside of his expertise. He was an engineer, pure and simple, and stuck to what he knew. But at a little after 1900 hours, they'd begun to have difficulty maintaining COM contact with the groundside team, - they'd chalked it up to the atmospheric electromagnetic interference, even with the dropship maintaining position _above_ it – and then, at about 1930, the interference had worsened again, now extending to the enemy ships and the "team" aboard them. Finally, they'd found themselves cut off entirely from communicating with _anybody_, a position a Prowler should never find itself in. Nobody was comfortable with that, and right now his team of human engineers were going over everything they could get their hands on, trying to find the problem. Finally, the captain had given him permission to deploy Ballast in an emergency capacity, no longer concerned with the brass' paranoid security concerns – they needed communication back up. That was up to Wendell, and he was failing – which meant it was his neck on the line.

Ballast crooned to himself beneath the machinery, tentacles seeming to softly stroke the delicate systems. Wendell had been briefed a bit on some Huragok anatonmy – their tentacles were covered in long, microscopic cilia that could make adjustments on a scale human hands were simply incapable of, and with a dexterity that was impossible to match.

He accessed his own chatter, coordinating with the rest of his team – updating himself on their progress, or rather their lack of it, and running through a list of subsystems that he still needed checked – the power supply, the connection to the external MASER dish, and possible stellar phenomena that could be cancelling their broadcasts – and almost jumped as he felt Ballast put a tentacle on his shoulder.

"Jeez! Don't sneak up on a man," he said, glad his team weren't there to see it.

Ballast looked suitably chastised, but piped up, _No error. Cannot fix._

He sighed. "Okay. We'll move to the next system, maybe see if we can rustle up some kind of exosuit for you to-"

_No. Problem found. No error. Cannot fix._

UNSC translation software handled Elite, Brute, and even Grunt speech, but so far it was still having trouble adapting to the multidimensional way Huragok communicated, chirps and whistled and waving tentacles. He sighed, exasperated.

"Problem found? Then fix!"

_Cannot fix. No error._

He frowned. "No error with the ship?"

_Yes!_ whistled Ballast, looking pleased. _Problem found, no error with ship, cannot fix!_

"Then what the hell is the problem?" he practically exploded.

_Forbidden_, Ballast chirped forlornly. _Cannot fix_.

Wendell felt like crying. Today was just not his day.

* * *

The prisoner sat on the floor, knees tucked up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, rocking back and forth a little. Shell-shock was probably not an accurate term, but it was close – the man had evidently just decided to curl up in a ball and simply _go away_ somewhere to stop himself thinking about what had happened. Vasquez had seen the same look on dozens of faces – sometimes it was kids who'd seen their parents torn apart by Jackals, sometimes it was troopers in the middle of a plasma bombardment as she struggled to get their arses into gear and out of firing range. Trauma did funny things to people, and even today, UNSC psychologists still didn't understand it as well as they thought they did.

Vasquez knew enough to know that the last thing she needed was a braindead vegetable to lug around when they could be attacked at any moment.

There was a flicker of yellow and orange as the fire sprang up. Vasquez didn't smoke, but Jansen did, the expensive Sweet Williams cigars that were usually favoured by the brass. She crouched before him, settled back on her haunches as she waved the lighter in front of the man's eyes, and saw them track the source of the light. Good. So he was still alert on some level.

"You and I got off on the wrong foot," she said, in what she hoped was a soothing tone. "Let's start from the beginning. Can you tell me your name?"

The eyes didn't leave the small, flickering light as he muttered, "Pete."

"Hello Pete," she said in the same voice she'd used with other traumatised civvies and servicemen. "I'm Amanda. It's very nice to meet you. Can you tell me what you do?"

The man stared at the flame, as if deep in thought. Vasquez passed it back and forth across his eyes again, watching him slowly track it, and asked again, "What's your job here? What do you do?"

Pete licked his lips nervously. "I…I fix stuff. Computers. I fix the computers. Put 'em back together."

A technician. Not a guard – great. On the one hand, at least she didn't need to worry about being stabbed in the back, even with the bullet-proof and blade-proof body armour – on the other, she'd hoped he could handle himself.

"Okay, Pete. Me? I'm a soldier." Technically, she was a Marine, but most civilians didn't know the difference and she wasn't in the mood to enlighten him. "I'm with the UNSC. I have a job to do. And to do it, I need you to stand and walk by yourself. Can you do that?"

Pete's rocking began to increase as his eyes widened, still tracking the lighter in front of him "Gotta go. Gotta get out."

"That's good. We're going topside, and we'll get you to a nice medbay when we can. Okay?"

"No. We gotta go now," he said, with emphasis. "Before the monsters come back."

"That's what we're going to do," she said."You don't want to go walking alone in the dark do you?" He shook his head emphatically, eyes widening even further. "And we need to ask you some questions, because we want to know what is going on here. So we need each other. I've got a man wounded already, which means I'm _two_ men down because someone needs to carry him. That means it's just me and Private Heller left to keep our eyes out for monsters. If Heller needs to carry you, then it's just me. And four eyes are better than two, aren't they?" He nodded. "Okay. So, can you walk?"

Pete blinked, finally breaking eye-contact with the flame. Most people would have preferred not to make eye contact with a battle-hardened Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, but he didn't know who she was, or how many men she'd throttled with her own bare hands. She smiled, hoping it didn't look too faked. He blinked again rapidly, and then nodded, struggling to his feet as Vasquez straightened.

She patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. "Good man." To the rest of her Marines, she bawled out, "Lets move it leathernecks!"

She swung her rifle down from her shoulder, flicking the torch light on, wondering for a moment how long her batteries had left, checking her HUD and sighed as she found she only had thirty minutes left. Then again, they were only twenty minutes out from Wallace and the rest of the platoon – surely they'd last that long? She considered rotating the team's flashlights, but decided they'd need as much light as they could get if the…things returned.

_Things_. It felt weird facing an enemy that didn't have a name again. She wasn't old enough to remember First Contact with the Covenant, but it had been a while before the UNSC had even discovered their attackers had a name. Knowledge was power, and when you're in the dark about your opponent every move can take you by surprise. She made a mental note to demand a better explanation from the ONI spooks in orbit – they had to know more than they'd told the Helljumpers.

They'd passed through dozens of the same pale brownish-grey corridors that the rest of this building was made of on the way here, sweeping them thoroughly and marking them on their TACMAP. Virtual nav markers pointed the way through the bland architecture – they wouldn't get lost. On the other hand, they'd only been searching for Insurrectionists on the way in – not alien creatures that could dig claws into polycrete walls and hang upside-down. Adding to the pressure, the lights were out – the beams from their helmet-mounted flashlights, or the torches slung under their rifles, swept through the darkness, piercing the shadows, checking the corners and ceiling.

It was unnerving – the thought that corridors they'd "cleared" might suddenly be hot again.

"Um…miss?" The sound had come from Pete, who, without a weapon, was glancing nervously into the shadows, but mostly trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone.

"It's ma'am," she said tersely. "What?"

"Who…who are you? I mean…you're not our regular guard, obviously, I mean, but-"

She sighed. "I told you. UNSC. We're to get you out of here."

"Well I know that, I just meant-"

She frowned, mentally reviewing the conversation. _You know that? _"Wait. What regular guard?"

Pete shrugged, but seemed glad of the opportunity to talk, to take his attention away from the lurking horrors that might surround them. "We usually have a few people topside, walking perimeter and reporting to command. I mean, I'm just a tech – most of us are. Well, except the scientists. You didn't pass them on the way in?"

Oh shit. Oh god, oh man, oh god. So the men up top, who'd been well-equipped and well-coordinated in their security of the base, had been UNSC? And her platoon had just slaughtered them in their rush to get inside. Yeah, they hadn't identified themselves as UNSC, and they'd had no identifying markers – no dog tags, no unit insignias or patches – but they'd still been UNSC. And in Vasquez's book, a blue-on-blue – what officers and REMFs called "friendly fire" – was the worst fuckup possible. Especially for ODSTs.

_Not her fuckup_, she tried to reassure herself. _ONIs fuckup_.

She decided against telling say anything…compromising. "As far as I know, we're the only UNSC forces here. We took some prisoners inside the building, but-"

"But we're not soldiers! I'm a damn tech!"

"You said."

"But…we…how could ONI do this to us?"

And this base, and the people who were in it, belonged to ONI as well. Well, shit. This just kept getting better and better. An ONI base doing god-knows-what with who-knows-how-many people, and ONI had sent an ODST platoon to take it out. This was the sort of thing that happened in Insurrectionist propaganda, or civilian conspiracy theories, not in real life! No way this had been so badly planned. No way Colonel Forrester would get his troopers involved in something like that. Just…no way.

And, as she wondered if her day could possibly get any worse, as she realised she'd taken her eyes off the flashlight, she felt something warm and thick drip onto her shoulder and a low hiss.

She was ready this time, throwing herself to the side, shoving Pete out of the way, as the creature landed where she had been, pulling the trigger in the air, spraying the creature with bullets. It screeched, holding an arm up to protect its face, and the tail came up and lashed out, striking the polycrete next to her.

She wondered what the hell was wrong with Heller, why she wasn't firing at it, and then she heard the booming of the other Marines' assault rifle, and the muzzle flashes lighting up the corridor – but not aimed at the creature attacking her. She heard another inhuman screech, and someone – was it Jansen? – roaring back at it, more assault rifle fire.

The first creature lashed its tail out again, Vasquez throwing herself to the side to avoid being impaled against the wall. She rolled, coming up on her knees, snapped her rifle up in a move instilled since basic training, and fired again – body shots this time. It rolled forward towards her, exposing only its armoured ridged back to the bullets, and as it came up, arms extended, claws out, jaws wide open, her leg kicked out, armoured boot catching it on the side of the head, sending it sprawling against a wall – it recovered quickly, using its momentum to dig claws into the polycrete, climbing – damn, what were the things, bloody gekkos? – twisting as it leapt again, and-

It growled as something else barrelled into it, tackling it, beating futilely against its black exoskeleton. Vasquez found a clear shot, and took it – bullets crashing into the creature's crest, bringing out spatters of green blood that smoked on the floor and wall where it hit.

Pete backed up as the thing writhed, confused, angry, and a little exultant. Vasquez, in the meantime, kicked its legs out from under it, and as it roared defiance she shoved the muzzle of her rifle into its gaping jaws, and pulled the trigger, blowing its brains out across the wall, where they also began bubbling and hissing.

She took a moment to flash a surprised look at Pete, and flashed a thumbs-up before searching for the rest of her team. Wells was backpedalling, dragging Jansen who was still firing his rifle at the other alien, even as Heller wrestled with the thing, hands clamped on its head and pushing with all her might as it tried to get its jaws around her face. _Something_ flashed out, snapping millimetres away from Heller's face – a biting tongue? – and Heller finally rolled the thing over, grabbed Wells' dropped shotgun, and smashed the butt of it into the thing's head. It reeled under the blow, then another, and another, and swiped a claw out which Heller ducked, rolling back away from – giving Vasquez a line of fire that didn't risk shooting the Marine either. Which she took.

The things were tough, she'd give them that – the bullets were hitting it, and weren't being deflected, but it still stayed standing, screeching in a pitch that made Pete cover his ear, grimacing in pain. Vasquez was unimpressed – her helmet filtered it out, softening it. She kept her rifle trained on it until her magazine ran out, and ducked to the side as the thing barrelled towards and past her, smashing itself against the wall.

Heller fired a shell into it, blowing its arm off. Another shot opened up its elongated cranium as it screamed, and a third finally blew the thing's face off.

There was a clicking noise still, and Vasquez realised that it was Heller, still trying to fire, and that the shells had only stopped because she'd run out. She moved in to deliver a kick, but Vasquez grabbed her by the collar, dragging her back.

"Easy Marine," she said. "It's not getting back up. 'Sides, you really want to waste a good boot on it?"

Heller looked down at the creature, its blood bubbling away, still shaking from adrenaline. She settled for spitting on the thing, retracting her faceplate for a moment to do so, ignoring the stench around them in the expression of disgust. Jansen chuckled painfully as Wells dragged him back to them. "That goes for me too, mate."

"You okay Heller?" Vasquez asked, concerned. The Marine nodded, flashing a thumbs-up - she was tough.

"I…I…I can't believe I..." Pete stammered, still staring wide-eyed at the two corpses. "I just-"

"Yeah," said Vasquez. "You did."

"But they could have-"

"Yeah."

"And-"

"Yeah," she said again, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder – and then grabbing him by the neck.

"Right. I don't care who you are, what this place is, et cetera. I want to know what happened here, I want to know why, and I want to know what the bloody hell those damn things are. If you have answers, I might not strangle you. If you don't, well…they say the Helljumpers drop feet first into hell. But that's just because we've got a good-sized pile to cushion the fall. Right?"

Pete nodded, and the grip lessened, allowing him to gasp for breath. He looked at the four of them, his eyes widening as the knowledge that he was now among the elite shock troopers of the UNSC hit him.

"P-pile of what?" he managed to stammer.

Vasquez grinned. It was not a pleasant gesture just now. "You really don't want to know, buddy."

* * *

Calypso slowly turned the screws of the hatch, leveraging it off, twisting it at an angle and drawing it into the vent. She slowly pushed it above and behind her, letting it rest against the side of the duct, where it wouldn't be noticed, and stuck her head out.

Despite all expectations, it was not bitten off by a deranged monstrosity. She took in the scene that met her – a large, cavernous chamber, occupied by massive machinery, linked by tubes to each other. Under normal conditions, the artificial gravity would have held crew onto the multi-storied decks as they checked energy readouts, circulated coolant, and monitored the rate of the uranium fusion.

They'd reached the engine room. Friggin' _finally._

As if reading her thoughts – a possibility Calypso had not entirely ruled out yet – Puppet Master piped up, "If we can retract the coolant access tubes, we should have a straight shot at some sensitive equipment. I hope you brought a hand grenade or two."

"Yes _dad_," she retorted, annoyed. She had four grenades clipped to her suit, taken from the armoury, precisely for this purpose. There was no way she was letting off a grenade under one of the creatures – not in space, and especially not where the hull was thin enough for even a small explosive to compromise the integrity of the compartment. Her suit was airtight, and she had her own air supply – which must be running low by now – but she didn't want to take the chance until she had to. She had a job to do, and she would do it – she'd only failed once in her career as a TROJAN, and it was the one time she was glad of it.

She slid herself out of the vent, feeling odd, missing the tug of gravity but glad of its absence – tumbling out of a ventilation shaft was not a dignified entrance, and the noise would attract someone…some_thing_. She waited until she was clear, and then activated her T-Pack, letting the thrusters compensate for her momentum, and stabilise her.

"Accessing engineering records…there should be two retractable tubes, located on the port and starboard sides. We won't need to damage both of them – one will be enough."

Calypso mused that it was an odd design – a ship's reactor build specifically to include a failsafe manual destruct option, but only if they either had a rocket handy or were good at tossing a grenade. The capture of a UNSC warship by an alien intelligence was still forbidden by the Cole Protocol, though, and every contingency had to be accounted for – an EMP burst destroying the ship-board AI before it could initiate a self-destruct would leave the crew dead in the water, unless they could manually destroy the ship's engines themselves.

Most warships were built like this, everything from the slightly larger Stalwart-class frigates to the massive Marathon-class cruisers and even the Trafalgar-class supercarriers. This wasn't the first time Calypso had destroyed a drifting starship and fought through its occupants. But this was definitely the strangest.

She didn't remember First Contact with the Covenant – she'd been eight years old at the time, and her childhood hadn't exactly been normal. But she'd grown up with the Covenant an ever-present danger, a threat that had hung over every man, woman and child for almost three decades. It was hard to imagine a life without an enemy like them – alien, a cause to rally against, a rival to surpass. And now she had just made her own personal First Contact with an entirely different alien race – were the intelligent? She didn't know. Were they even from the planetoid, Acheron? She had no idea. Did the ONI spook aboard the Prowler even know they existed? She was equally in the dark about that, just as she seemed to know nothing about why these ships were even here. Not to mention that the communications disruption meant she had no idea how Andrew and the ground team were doing.

So many unknown variables. So many opportunities for disaster.

She wasn't a stranger to that, either. She visited it upon her enemies with frequency.

"Strange," mused Puppet Master. "I accessed the ship's MASER array, and there's an odd…I'm not quite sure what it is."

Calypso nodded absent-mindedly. "You're not going to tell me it stops explosions, are you?"

"No, but it bears further-"

"Then it can wait," she said, drawing a grenade. "I've got work to do."

Even though the reactor was still humming with power, the engineering compartment was still dark, and she could only see by the soft blue glow of Cerenkov radiation emitted by the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine behind the reactor. An irony, since this was the place _generating_ the power. She uploaded a map of a Mako-class corvette's engine room, plotted a path that took her up to the second deck, where the coolant distribution controls were housed, and rocketed up. It felt good getting up to speed, after hours of taking it slow and careful through the ship's corridors. She'd checked her motion tracker – no activity. From the light of the SFTE, there wasn't anything in her path either. A refreshing change.

She slowed as she reached the monitoring displays and controls, setting her feet down, magnetising them so that she could walk, giving the illusion of normal motion. She shone her helmet lights onto the readouts – they didn't mean much to her, but Puppet Master would find them as easy to read as the alphabet.

"Another oddity," Puppet Master noted, this time sounding less curious and more puzzled. "Accessing chronology…the reactor was deactivated _before_ the aliens began their hostile takeover. A remote signal. Attempting to trace signal…unsuccessful. But if I were a gambling man – and I hasten to remind you that I am neither a gambler nor any sort of "man" – I would place my bets on-"

"The base," she finished. "They switched the power off remotely, leaving the ships dead in the water to stop the things escaping."

"Indeed. Perhaps an emergency failsafe, one of many contingencies. When one deals with such an organism, one can't be too careful."

"Or," Calypso conjectured, "They planned the entire thing. The crew of the _Rising Sun_ didn't notice the things come aboard because they were hidden, knowing the _Beetle_ and _Fenris Wolf_ would respond. Some sick science experiment."

Puppet Master sounded impressed. "You have a cynical mind, VECTOR. Have you considered donating it to science? I would dearly love to meet the AI it would create."

"One way or another, Puppet Master, you'll be dead if that ever happens," she said, tapping a few keys. The control panel touchscreen flickered and activated, and she brought up the menu for the ship's electronics – COMs were down, but if she could activate the thrusters, switching them on and off, maybe she could send a message to the _Hunter's Arrow_ in Morse code._HuntersH_

"There is one last thing puzzling me," Puppet Master added. "Your external atmospheric gauges are reading that it is, shall we say 'unseasonably warm'. Why?"

She kept searching the display, uninterested. "Emissions from the reactor. Doesn't bother me – suit's heat resistant up to 1000 degrees Celsius."

"But the reactor does not give of thermal energy. How could it? That gets dumped into the heat sinks, which would need to be turned off. And they weren't. Which means that someone set the ship to elevate the temperature in the reactor compartment. It's perfectly intact, and it's heating one room – why?"

Calypso finally found the electronic equivalent of the lightswitch, and pressed a thumb against it.

A second later, she wished the hadn't.

Her motion tracker had failed to pick up any movement – that, at least, was not a malfunction, because there was nothing to move, even in zero gravity, when anything not bolted down floated. And now that the room's lights had activated, she could see why she hadn't encountered any gory debris – the aliens must have been busy, because the inside of the reactor compartment's bulkheads were coated, top to bottom, in the chitinous material that the corridors had been made of. Except that there seemed to be a colour difference – occasionally, there was a patch of paler material. In fact, there were a lot of patches.

After zooming in, she wished she hadn't. The patches were not the hardened secretions she'd taken them to be – they were bodies, sticking out of the walls, wrapped in the stuff like a solid web.

She tried to count, but gave up after a couple of dozen – this had to be at least the entire engineering crew, and she'd spotted a few in BDUs.

And every one of them had been torn open from the inside by something clambering out.

"Well," said Puppet Master, trying to sound haughty but an unmistakably disturbed tone permeating his voice. "At least we know what happened to the rest of the crew."

There had been another very good reason why the motion trackers hadn't picked anything up. They worked based on air disturbance, bouncing soundwaves and tracking the flow of them through the air, off objects, and build up a three-dimensional image that tracked rate of motion. Ideally, you could reconfigure one to make a 3-D map of an area. But usually, it only displayed motion as dots.

If nothing was moving, then nothing turned up.

Her motion tracker beeped a warning. And then it turned red, as the entire inner surface of what she realised, in a moment of clarity, was the centre of the alien "hive", began to buzz.

"Oh for the love of-"

* * *

The prisoners were nervous. And that nervousness seemed to be spreading, because their ODST guards had started fidgeting, casting furtive looks at one another, and checking their maps and COMs gear. Routine actions designed to keep a mind off a fact that it doesn't want to reflect on.

Corporal Nelson was still crouched down beside the ground-to-orbit relay, tinkering with its internal workings. He'd pulled a couple of work stations near him, housings cracked open and the internal workings raided for parts, especially the precious memory crystal that UNSC quantum computing relies on. But there isn't much hope – not really. The Spartan, Laura, had already had a look at it, and had concluded that it was a lost cause – as much of a whizz as James Nelson was at electronics, Wallace doubted he could outdo a supersoldier.

"Do you even know what the problem is?" he asked, over a private COM channel – no sense in letting the prisoners know they were cut off. Bad enough that they knew there was a problem at all, even if they didn't know what it was.

"Sorry sir. I've gone over everything – the wiring, the calibration, and the new crystal matrix. No technical problems at all." Nelson sounded tired, and angry – he didn't blame the man. "I don't think it's a technical issue at all, sir."

Wallace frowned. "Are we being jammed?"

"If we are, then it's sophisticated stuff – it's blocking out only long-range COMs, leaving the short-range and point-to-point transmissions. Don't see the point – better to block the whole spectrum, if you can. And if we're being jammed, I'd be able to detect it somehow – there's nothing showing up on any of the scanners."

Wallace sighed. "Keep working on it."

That was all they could do – keep working on it, hoping that something new would leap out at them that they'd overlooked, something they could deal with. Because just sitting here, waiting, was drive Wallace nuts.

He hoped Indigo would report in soon. They'd cracked open the elevator shaft, rappelling down in search of their quarry. He didn't even know what they were looking for – he also didn't care, just as long as they got it over and done with soon, so they could get back to the Prowler and out of this star system.

He hated that COMs were down. At first it had just cut them off from the ship, which was fine – Helljumpers were experts on working without external support. But it had gotten worse lately. He'd lost contact with his patrols. And that made him nervous.

Securing a building didn't just mean capturing one room and demanding everyone surrender. It meant scanning it for booby-traps, people trying to hide, searching for files and documents of interest. Corporal Vasquez's Fireteam has been sent to sweep the maintenance wing, clear it of mines or grenades. Corporal Kendall was currently sweeping the barracks with his men, and Corporal Enderby was meant to be accessing the structure's server – he didn't know how any of them were getting on, but they were good Helljumpers. They'd get the job done and kill anyone who tried to stop them.

He glanced over at the prisoners, huddled together, looking nervously at the shadows of the room. Did they know something he didn't?

Wallace felt an overwhelming urge to grab one of the prisoners and throttle him until he talked. He wasn't exactly used to interrogating enemies – Covenant did everything they could to stop the UNSC taking prisoners in the first place, Elites committing suicide, Brutes going into berserker rages, and even strapping bombs onto the creatures who didn't have the dedication to kill themselves. And Insurrectionists…he'd fought them, but not for a while, and standing orders were that prisoners were to be kept isolated and untouched until a specialist ONI interrogator could arrive. Maybe they were worried that the Innie might start making sense? Those days, however, were long over.

He didn't think those rules applied here, though. The prisoners were obviously not Innies – or, if they were, they were hardly soldiers trained at resisting interrogation. They looked nervous as hell, and their eyes kept darting to the shadows of the room.

That was even more irritating – the idea that, as terrified of the Helljumpers as the prisoners were, they were even more scared of something else, something he didn't know about, and that he wasn't allowed to ask.

There was a muffled "Sir!" from the perimeter guard at the opening of one of the tunnels. He jogged over, finger on the trigger of his weapon, and let out a sigh of relief when he saw it was four human figures coming out of the darkness – Vasquez and her Marines. Plus, he noticed, somebody else, who looked equally scared. They looked tired and harassed, but otherwise fine, with the exception of PFC Jansen. A couple of Corpsmen bounded over, taking the Marine off of Private Wells' back, and carrying him over to the first aid station. Vasquez gave a nod that was as good as a salute.

"What the hell happened out there?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Something in the tunnels. Alien-"

"Covenant?" he asked, concerned. "The dropship radioed possible Covenant movement before we lost contact."

"Negative. I don't know what they were, but they weren't Covenant. Or Flood either," she added, before he could jump to an even worse conclusion.

Wallace sighed again, this time in irritation. "You'll need to brief me on this, if it's enough to put a Helljumper down." He glance at the stranger, staring wide-eyed at the assembled Helljumpers. "And who's he?"

"He's a technician. UNSC. They all are. As far as they know, this place belongs to ONI."

Wallace mulled that over. Did it really change anything? Probably not, but it gave him another reason not to take down the dartboard in the ship's recreation room – the one with the ONI insignia pinned to it.

"Does he know anything about these alien things?"

"I don't think so, sir," she said.

"Then get him with the rest of the prisoners. If ONI wants to debrief them, then who are we to question orders?"

Vasquez nodded at the man, and then jerked her head to the gaggle of subdued prisoners. Wallace frowned – a few of the prisoners seemed to recognise the man, and not in a good way. As he moved towards them, a couple of them drew back. He paused.

Vasquez jabbed him with her rifle. "Come on-"

The movement was fast, faster than the time it took for Wallace to raise his weapon and fire off a shot which hit the wall behind the man. In one fluid motion, faster than anybody Wallace had ever seen, he'd side-stepped, grabbed Vasquez's rifle arm, put another around her neck, kicked out the back of her knees, and drawn her sidearm, pressing it against her head. He looked at Wallace, transformed – his cringing was replaced with a confident rigidness, his astonishment was turned into a cool, clinical and analytical look as he surveyed the room full of ODSTs packing enough firepower to drop him and the rest of the prisoners, all trained on him.

"I can assure you," he said to the room at large, "that if you try to shoot me again I will kill young Amanda here. I may not be able to strangle her, but a 12.7mm SAP-HE round will probably puncture more than just helmet. Oh, and don't struggle, my dear," he said to Vasquez, "because you are nowhere near strong enough to overpower me."

He looked over at Wallace. "Now, you said something about a dropship?"

* * *

The doors didn't shake from sudden impacts. They weren't gently peeled off their hinges, either. They were nowhere near that large or heavy enough to warrant such brute force. Andrew simply held up his ONI-provided chatter to a retinal/fingerprint/voice recognition scanner, let it remotely interface with the security system, and waited until he heard a dull clunk. He pushed the doors open and stepped across the threshold, titanium boots clacking against the tiled floor.

He was almost disappointed by how easy this had been. Quite an anticlimax – after all he had heard, after all he'd done, he'd expected more of a…well, challenge.

The doors clicked shut behind him, and he let them. They were designed to keep people out, not in. A simply kick would suffice if need be, and until then he was fine with leaving it intact. More to the point, he looked around the darkened room, assessing the state of things.

They left much to be desired. Andrew had seen the inside of many laboratories in his career – the labs of his youth, where Doctor Halsey had injected her SPARTAN-II "candidates" with vaccinations, growth hormones, and other preparations for their "graduation". The surgical suites used to augment the young Spartans, where half of his friends had died or been horrifically crippled. The laboratories where technicians had developed and manufactured the MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armour that he wore, where theyw ere tested, and where they were occasionally repaired after a strenuous mission. And, since being attached to VORAUSSICHT, there had been the many different labs he'd been involved in securing, where determined young men and women had done unthinkable things in the name of the human race's survival.

This one was different. Much different.

For one thing, it didn't seem to contain many testing stations. There was a dozen or so holographic displays along the wide end of the room, many of them shattered beyond repair, the rest heavily damaged. A pity – not that he needed them, since his suit could project any relevant data he needed. But it would have been convenient. He'd have to get Laura down here after she secured the building's server, and see if she could rig something together.

The rest of the room consisted of work stations, though not, apparently, for practical testing – most of them were computer work terminals. Some personal effects remained, scattered – a holo-still of a woman and child, somebody's family. A spilt ceramic cup of coffee. Digital-pens left where they'd been put or thrown down. A few stacks of paper were scattered at the other end of the room – he knelt, picking one up, reading a printoff of thermal variations in temperature over a thirty day period, complete with graphs and a detailed spectroscopic analysis of atmosphere. He looked at another one – an internal memo, reminding personnel that personal effects could be collected from sorting bay seven, delivered by the UNSC _Fenris Wolf_.

The revelation didn't surprise him. He'd suspected it, and he also suspected that the Lieutenant Commander had too. He also didn't care – whatever was happening here, it was _not_ approved by ONI, whatever its own staff might thing, and was therefore filed under the category of "shut it down now."

He shuffled the papers together, using a holo-still display pad as a paperweight to keep them together, set down on the desk. ONI would have plenty to pour over, one they rarely got. In fact, as surprised as he had been at the lack of resistance so far, he was more surprised that the facility's nexus, the place where it was controlled from, had been simply abandoned. Even under standard ONI operating procedure, it should have been destroyed in the event of the potential compromise or capture of it by a hostile force. That would have extended to Insurrectionists too. And the cups, the stills, the paper, it was all too…convenient.

It's a fallacy that Spartan's have super-human intelligence. They have eidetic long- and short-term memories, process thoughts faster and more efficiently, and can extrapolate conclusions from less data than most need. But really, there's only so much that a faster neural conduction rate can do – at a fundamental level, Spartans can still make mistakes – misjudge an enemy's next action, fail to account for some variable, or dismiss a seemingly irrelevant detail. They are, after all, still human, despite what ONI propaganda says.

It was for that reason that Andrew cursed himself as he dropped to his knees, the armour he was wearing suddenly becoming heavy and cumbersome, unable to resist the suddenly increased pull of gravity, the unseen threat that he had missed. He pressed an arm to the ground, struggling to stay upright, to try to stand – if he could get to his feet, keep his balance, get to the doors before he blacked out from the pressure, maybe-

"_Hello, Andrew. It has been a long time since our last meeting, has it not? Please, have a seat. I'm sure we have much to discuss…"_


End file.
